A personal note: I heard bits and pieces of Frederic Rzewski’s Songs of Insurrection in progress while the composer was my house guest in 2016, composing at my piano. Later that year Rzewski played the whole work for a few of us privately. Although he intended to make revisions, I still thought that Songs of Insurrection counted among Rzewski’s strongest large-scale multi-movement works, on a par with The People United Will Never Be Defeated, the Four North American Ballads, the 1977 Four Pieces and his mammoth ‘novel for piano’ The Road.

Rzewski bases each of its seven sections on a protest song from a different country. The first section imparts a slightly whimsical contrapuntal treatment to ‘Die Moorsoldaten’ (‘The peat-bog soldiers’). By contrast, the Russian folk song ‘Katusha’ (used by Italian partisans to fight Fascism) inspires more introspective and brooding piano-writing, and are the hints of John Lennon’s ‘Give peace a chance’ more than coincidental? The American civil rights hymn ‘Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around’ recalls Rzewski’s dark and bluesy writing in his North American Ballad ‘Which side are you on’, a Russian folk song. ‘Foggy dew’ begins with the plain-spoken melody, which quickly fragments into angular, agitated sequences of bitonal counterpoint.

The stark fluidity of the fifth movement (based on ‘Grândola, vila morena’), or perhaps the subsequent movement’s clear-cut and playful linear trajectory, may be a good starting point for listeners new to Rzewski’s personal brand of eclecticism. Conversely, the seventh and longest movement demands a lot from listeners and pianists alike, as the music journeys from inside-the-piano explorations and petulant outbursts to myriad birdlike trills, repeated notes and flourishes.

I regret that the powerful premiere performances by Daan Vandewalle (the pianist for whom Rzewski composed Songs of Insurrection) never made it to commercial release. However, the composer ardently approves of California-based composer/pianist Thomas Kotcheff’s premiere studio recording. And so do I! Kotcheff’s incisive articulation, his wide dynamic range, his acute sense of timing and characterisation and his keen awareness of bass lines not only penetrate Rzewski’s sound world to the point of clairvoyance but also mirror Rzewski’s own exceptional pianism. The robust yet well-detailed engineering adds further distinction to a major release of an important work by a most sympathetic interpreter whom I look forward to hearing again soon, in any repertoire.