Frederic Rzewski's monumental The People United Will Never Be Defeated! is undeniably one of the masterworks for piano of the late twentieth century, not only because of the intellectual and musical rigor of its structure, and its dazzling virtuoso qualities, but because it's so immediately appealing. This is a piece that general audiences, not only new music specialists, can easily fall in love with. Dutch pianist
Ralph van Raat's performance is adequate, but with so many extraordinary versions available, including those by the composer,
Ursula Oppens,
Stephen Drury, and
Marc-André Hamelin, the main attraction of this recording is its bargain price.
Van Raat's interpretation is pretty much middle of the road -- he doesn't take the risks of someone like
Stephen Drury, but he doesn't get the payoff of a thrilling and hypnotically propulsive reading, either. He plays most of the variations well enough (except that he doesn't pull off the languid swing of the bluesy sections with the style of someone for whom it comes naturally), but he doesn't convey the inexorability of the work's carefully structured architecture. The cadenza he wrote is especially weak -- it does nothing to prepare for the final return of the theme.
This may seem like a quibble, but the fact that the piece is on a single track is a serious drawback. The structure of the work's theme and 36 variations is transparent, but the details of the relationships between variations are rich and complex and offer many opportunities for exploration for anyone interested in getting to know the piece well. That's not possible to do when you aren't sure where you are in the piece, and with the whole thing on one track, without any indication of how long each variation is, it's hard to stay oriented. There's a good reason that other recordings of the work put each variation on its own track. Anyone interested in getting to know this extraordinary work should pass on this version and check out one of the four listed above.