He doesn’t demand, yet he commands

If Sunday around 6:30, toward the end of a balmy Indian summer day, you happened to be strolling through Claremont Village and peered into an old-fashioned Italian restaurant, you might have noticed a gray-haired, bearded man sitting at the bar drinking an espresso.

He was wearing a tweed jacket, a frayed worker’s cap and a worn backpack. He looked like the kind of ancient wanderer who shows up every so often on college campuses, a onetime promising intellectual with a history of hard times and bad luck.

Half an hour later, this small man, hair mussed, walked onto the stage of Bridges Hall, the jewel-box small theater at Pomona College three blocks away. No more than 40 people were in the audience. He had removed his coat. He placed loose, tattered sheets of music on the stand of what appeared to be a beat-up music-department piano, took off his glasses and began to play a short, slightly crazy piece, “Dust,” made up of many six-second fragments. He then launched into what at first sounded like an eccentric solo version of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto.

It was, in fact, a radical new cadenza that lasted nearly as long as the concerto’s first movement. From the point of view of composition, of a reimagining of classical music in a contemporary context and of piano technique, this was an extraordinary exercise. To try to imagine what Beethoven would write were he alive today is silly. But this untidy figure at the piano suggested something of what it must have felt like to be in the presence of Beethoven’s visionary power.

The man was Frederic Rzewski, the greatest pianist-composer of our time and something of a legend in modern music. His hourlong set of virtuosic variations on the Chilean political song “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” was written in 1975 and is the only solo piano piece of its scope to have become a classic in the last three decades and have been recorded by several pianists with heroic techniques. The version of it that concluded his recital lasted longer than an hour because it ended with a riveting 10-minute improvised cadenza of its own.

Rzweski’s appearance at Pomona, for which admission was free, came with little advance word and no publicity. That might seem an outrage, given that Rzewski (whose name is pronounced Schev-ski), a 68-year-old American expatriate who has long lived in Brussels, doesn’t come to the West Coast often, although his music is often played by the EAR Unit. He was finishing up a tour of small colleges, many in the Midwest, where he was probably just as ignored as in Pomona. But somehow the circumstances of the appearance seemed apt for an outsider artist with strong political convictions.

Less a Beethoven, perhaps, than a latter-day leftist Liszt, Rzewski is also our anti-Liszt. He refuses to play the celebrity or music industry game. He operates as a hit-and-run artist, usually gone before you know what hit you.

Rzewski is devoted to social change, to the struggle of the people against oppressive government, and often he takes off from a popular political melody, as in “The People United.” But although he may look like an anarchist of old, his music is a deep and meaningful meditation on freedom and structure.

He is an inspired improviser while, at the same time, a control freak. And his middle way, where both approaches are in dialogue, is a brilliant manipulation of forces that can pull apart not just modern music but society. Oh, and he also gets some of the most thrilling sonorities from the piano I have ever heard.

“The People United” begins with the catchy tune, wonderfully harmonized and arranged. The variations are obsessively structured into six sets of six. Each set works through the same series, beginning simply and then focusing on rhythm, melody, counterpoint and harmony. The final variation of each set is a combination of the preceding five. Each of the six sets takes on the overall character of one of the six variations. The final set is a combination of the previous five, and the 36th variation is a combination of the earlier 35, bits and pieces frantically speeded up.

Are you with me? It doesn’t matter, because the feeling of all this process is one of liberation. In technique and style, the writing embraces Bach, Stockhausen and much of what came in between, including the blues. Every new variation is a fresh surprise. Often the music is wild, but it never loses its affection for the tune, its visceral urgency or its sense of struggle. For all his rigor, Rzewski knows how to tickle the ear. He is always captivatingly accessible but never trivial. His fingers are a phenomenon.

Monday afternoon, Rzewski gave a talk at Pomona College on non sequiturs. Congestion on the 10 and the 60 made Pomona that day its own non sequitur, not logically connected to downtown Los Angeles. I was left musing in traffic about what connects and doesn’t connect in Rzewski’s music. As an improviser, he maintains an interesting flow, so connection isn’t much of an issue. Even encountering so great a figure playing a free concert for so few may not have been a non sequitur. If Rzewski’s commitment inspired only a student or two, that matters.

But why hasn’t an enterprising soloist and orchestra tried out the extravagant new cadenza in a performance of Beethoven’s popular Fourth Concerto? Why isn’t the seven-disc Nonesuch set of Rzewski playing his music that came out four years ago more widely appreciated for being one of the landmark recordings of American music? Why wasn’t he engaged to play at a major Los Angeles venue on this tour?

If not a non sequitur, Rzewski’s anonymity Sunday was, at the very least, weird.

*

[email protected]