Sospeso presents the world premiere of the celebrated American composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski's homage to Elliott Carter, Ninety-Six, a work written for Sospeso, on Friday, January 30, 2004. 

Mr. Rzewski studied with Randall Thompson (counterpoint) and Walter Piston (orchestration) at Harvard University (BA 1958) and with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt at Princeton University (MFA 1960), where he also attended courses in philosophy and Greek. In 1960–61 he studied with Dallapiccola in Florence on a Fulbright scholarship. Throughout most of the 1960s he was active as a pianist and teacher in Europe; he took part in the first performances of Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X (1962) and Plus Minus (1964), and taught at the Kölner Kurse für Neue Musik (1963, 1964 and 1970). He has received grants from the Ford Foundation for study with Elliott Carter in Berlin (1963–5) and from the Fromm Foundation (1969). In 1966 in Rome he co-founded with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum the live electronic ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV). He returned to New York in 1971 but from 1976 he has divided his time between Rome and Liège, where he became professor of composition at the Conservatoire Royal in 1977; in 1984 he was visiting professor of composition at Yale University. He has also taught at the universities of Cincinnati, SUNY, Buffalo, California (San Diego), the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and the Berlin Hochschule der Künste. Among his commissions are those from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (1974, for What is Freedom?) and the NEA (1977, for Song and Dance; 1979, for A Long Time Man). 

With MEV, on which he had a strong influence, Rzewski explored collective improvisation (in Work Songs); this led to the socialist-political concerns expressed in such works as Coming Together and Attica, composed in 1972 to the text of a letter from an inmate of Attica (New York) State Prison, and to works combining elements from both written and improvised music (Les moutons de Panurge). He went on to explore folk and popular melodies in settings that are sometimes unambiguously tonal and often display exceptional virtuosity. One favoured scheme is that of a short theme followed by a large number of short variations, including climaxes of dramatic force (e.g. in The People United will never be Defeated, A Long Time Man and, especially, Antigone-legend). Several works of the late 1970s show a return to experimental and graphic notation (Le silence des espaces infinis, The Price of Oil). The 1980s found him dealing with 12-note techniques in novel ways (Antigone-legend, The Persians). More spontaneous approaches appear in later compositions (Whangdoodles, Sonata). Unusually large-scale works include the oratorio The Triumph of Death and The Road, a 5-hour ‘novel’ for solo piano. All of his works have a characteristic drive and intensity. He has participated as pianist and conductor in some of the recordings of his compositions, and as pianist in recordings of works by Boulez, Eisler and others.

Edward Murray, from the New Grove.