Composed between 2008 and 2016, the works on this release count among the strongest and most evocative from Frederic Rzewski’s later years. The pianist in these premiere recordings is Bobby Mitchell, whom Rzewski himself frequently singled out for praise.

The disc commences with ‘Ruins’ and ‘Wake Up’, the last two pieces from the 2014 piano cycle Dreams. In ‘Ruins’, an opening contrapuntal episode dominated by three-against-two rhythms leads into the main theme sparsely reiterated in the piano’s extreme registers. Then passages consisting of building tremolos and more intense counterpoint alternate. Mitchell’s agile fingers brilliantly dispatch episodes of rapid détaché writing that evoke the fourth part of Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, albeit in denser form.

‘Wake Up’ takes its cue from the Woody Guthrie song of the same name. Again, toccata-like patterns and trilled sequences go back and forth. Mitchell’s creativity comes into imaginative play as he takes advantage of the composer’s option to improvise a cadenza over a chord held by the sostenuto pedal. By contrast, War Songs (2008) is lighter and more aphoristic in style. Here Mitchell’s nuanced precision differs from the sterner, gaunter impression of Rzewski’s live performance from Valencia uploaded to imslp.org.

Rzewski describes the three pieces comprising Winter Nights (composed for Mitchell in 2015) as ‘hard to get across to an audience, very introspective, and written in a kind of uncompromising polytonality that is distinctly against the prevailing fashion of easily consumed hard-driving optimism’. Actually, the harmonic language doesn’t really differ from Rzewski’s norm, while Mitchell’s variegated sonority and long-lined projection certainly ‘get across’.

Imagine a fantasy on the ‘Dies irae’ in the form of a muffled march and you’ll get the gist of Saints and Sinners (2016), which stylistically relates to Rzewski’s transformation of ‘The Peat Bog Soldiers’ in his 2016 piano cycle Songs of Insurrection’s opening piece. Percussive single-note strokes, runs in fifths and seemingly simple parallel triads dominate the topography. At times Rzewski appears to wind things down only to rev up his engines anew. Because Mitchell seamlessly blends his improvised cadenza into the composition’s fabric, you’d naturally assume that the pianist is playing echt Rzewski at that point.

Symbolically, perhaps, Mitchell recorded this release at producer Marc-Henri Cykiert’s Brussels studio The Right Place, playing the same idiosyncratic Steinway grand that the composer used for his recordings issued on ‘Rzewski plays Rzewski’ (Nonesuch). However, the real ‘authenticity’ ultimately rests within Mitchell’s compelling, sympathetic and authoritative interpretations.