Monday, 18 October 1999

`People United' performance brings down the house

REVIEW

Pianist Stephen Drury, assisted by Sons of Orpheus, performed yesterday's Piano and Friends recital at Leo Rich Theatre. By Ken Keuffel Jr.
The Arizona Daily Star 

Nobody who attended yesterday's Piano and Friends recital will ever forget it.

The superhuman pianist was Stephen Drury, a celebrated contemporary music interpreter who teaches at Boston's New England Conservatory. He conquered, from memory, a nearly unconquerable creation: American Frederic Rzewski's 36 variations on ``The People United Will Never Be Defeated,'' a song by Chilean Sergio Ortega.

The now-exiled Ortega wrote ``People United'' in 1973, months before Gen. Agusto Pinochet's coup. Before Drury's performance, Tucson's Sons of Orpheus sang this moving leftist anthem in Spanish and with the zeal of revolutionaries. Grayson Hirst directed forcefully.

Structurally, Rzewski's ``People United'' variations first quote the Ortega song. Six sets of variations follow, with some variations summarizing earlier material.

The result is ``an aural image of `the people united' - individuals in all their diversity coming together bit by bit to form a union,'' said Drury.

The variations belong in the league of similar marathon pieces by Bach and Beethoven. They're that good.

On paper, though, the 1975 hour-long work seems prohibitive. Its more than 1,000 measures contain an abundance of contrapuntal devices and stylistic variety (jazz, Stockhausen, crashing chords reminiscent of a Romantic concerto).

At some points, too, the pianist whistles, yells and manipulates sounds by reaching into the piano.

Yet hearing the complex variations yesterday left you feeling not tired or on overload but swept away and exhilarated.

Drury's engaging musicianship had a lot to do with that. And so did Ortega's tune. In an excellent pre-concert lecture, local pianist Kim Hayashi said, ``Music through the use of recognizable tunes has a staying power on your brain and emotions.''

Both Rzewski and Ortega, who are now teaching in Europe, attended the performance. They, Drury and Hirst received the kind of standing ovation usually heard in opera houses.

After yesterday's performance, Drury said he learned Rzewski's variations in about a year. He has performed the work about 15 times since the early 1990s.

Thank his mother for making him practice.

A strong performance of Robert Schumann's ``Symphonic Etudes'' began the program.