Rzewski: The People United – Kiilerich

Some pieces get performed. This one gets survived — or, in the best performances, transcended, which is a different thing entirely.

Frederic Rzewski wrote The People United Will Never Be Defeated! in six weeks during the summer of 1975, and you can practically hear the deadline pressure baked into its architecture — thirty-six variations that keep threatening to spin out of control before some new contrapuntal device or hammered ostinato yanks them back. The tune itself, Sergio Ortega’s “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!,” was already a battle hymn by the time Rzewski got to it, sung in the streets of Santiago before Pinochet’s tanks made such singing a capital offense. Rzewski, ever the political animal — Juilliard-trained, Darmstadt-radicalized, a fixture of the Musica Elettronica Viva collective before he settled into a professorship in Liège rather than anywhere in his native land — built something like a twentieth-century answer to the Diabelli Variations, except where Beethoven ironizes a waltz, Rzewski means every note of solidarity he writes.

The Danish pianist Ole Kiilerich, a name that means nothing on this side of the Atlantic and not a great deal on the other, turns out to be exactly the kind of unheralded interpreter this repertoire rewards. He studied with Ursula Oppens — the piece’s dedicatee — and with Stephen Drury, both of whom have their own recordings in circulation, so he arrives with the score practically in his bloodstream rather than merely under his fingers.

And it shows, though not immediately.

My first pass through this disc left me cold, actually — I found the opening statement of the theme almost too polite, too rounded at the edges for music that ought to sound like a fist raised in a public square. Give it time. Kiilerich is not a pianist who announces his intentions in the first sixty seconds; he’s building something, variation by variation, and only in retrospect do you understand the logic of his patience. By the time we reach the whistling variation — yes, the pianist is asked to whistle, an instruction that has embarrassed lesser artists into silence or into a kind of sheepish murmur — Kiilerich produces a clean, unaffected pitch that floats over the keyboard texture like it belongs there, which of course it does.

Where he distinguishes himself, finally, is in the piece’s slow accumulation of density. Rzewski score directions call for episodes “with determination,” “dreamlike,” “tender but with agitation” — contradictory instructions that most pianists resolve by picking one adjective and running with it. Kiilerich instead lets the ambiguity sit. His voicing in the more contrapuntal variations, the ones that pile ostinato on ostinato until the texture threatens to collapse under its own density, has a chamber-player’s clarity — you can trace individual lines the way you’d follow separate voices in a Bach fugue, never mind that the vocabulary here runs from Rachmaninovian sweep to tone clusters to outright improvisatory cadenza.

The elephants in this particular room are Marc-André Hamelin on Hyperion and Ralph van Raat on Naxos, both barnstorming, virtuosic, superbly engineered accounts that have more or less defined the modern discography. Hamelin brings his usual pyrotechnic command — those glassy, take-no-prisoners octave passages near the climax are almost frightening in their precision — while van Raat leans into the work’s political anger with an almost percussive fury. Kiilerich doesn’t try to out-muscle either of them, and he’d lose that contest if he did. What he offers instead is a kind of interpretive patience, a willingness to let the piece breathe and accrue meaning rather than detonate it. Ursula Oppens’s own pioneering 1978 Vanguard album, newly reissued, remains an important historical document — you can hear the score being discovered in real time, its ferocity unmediated by decades of rendition tradition — but the recorded sound is thin, occasionally suffering audible dropouts, and Oppens’s granitic authority now sounds a little foursquare next to what her own student achieves here.

No fillers on this disc, unlike the Hamelin and van Raat programs, which pad things out with a couple of the North American Ballads apiece. Some listeners will feel shortchanged. I don’t, particularly — thirty-six variations lasting the better part of an hour make their own case for solitary programming, and Kiilerich’s is not an interpretation that wants company.

Call it a sleeper. Not a first choice for listeners wanting maximum adrenaline, but for anyone who wants to hear this extraordinary, sui generis work unfold with intelligence, warmth, and a pianist’s rather than a gladiator’s sense of pacing — seek it out.