Search - John [Composer] Adams, Frederic Rzewski, Emanuele Arciuli :: Rzewski: Four Pieces; Adams; Phrygian Gates

Frederic Rzewski, born in 1938, is a major American composer as well as virtuoso pianist. A student of Virgil Thomson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and Milton Babbitt at Harvard and Princeton, he later studied in Italy with Luigi Dallapiccola. After co-founding Musica Elettronica Viva with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum, Rzewski returned to New York in 1971. He is especially famous for his set of piano variations on The People United Will Never Be Defeated, written in 1974. The Four Pieces on this recording came the next year. John Adams, born in 1947 in Worcester, Massachusetts, is a much-honored American composer with strong roots in minimalism. His opera Nixon in China won the 1989 Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition. Adams's work On the Transmigration of Souls, a choral work commemorating the victims of the September 11 attacks, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Phrygian Gates is a piano piece written by Adams in 1977-1978. The piece,! together with its smaller companion China Gates, is considered Adams's "opus one." They are, according to his own claims, his first compositions consisting of a coherent personal style. Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli performed a program at the Italian Academy in 2003 that was described by Anne Midgette in the New York Times as "an excellent recital of contemporary music". While Arciuli?s repertoire ranges from the music of Bach to the present, he is best known for exciting and nuanced performances of recent music for solo piano, particularly by American and Italian composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Giacinto Scelsi, Salvatore Sciarrino, John Adams, and Frederic Rzewski.