The 2008 Miami International Piano Festival closed on Sunday but, increasingly, the festival's performances are circulating far and wide. Video Artists International has issued a dozen DVDs of festival performances, and two recent VAI releases show the festival at its finest with a pair of extraordinary performances from 2007.
`RZEWSKI PLAYS RZEWSKI'
In March, composer-pianist Frederic Rzewski performed his remarkable The People United Shall Never Be Defeated! in a memorable evening at the Amaturo Theatre (VAI, $24.95). Arguably, the greatest set of variations ever written by an American composer, The People United mines a revolutionary Chilean protest song for a massive set of 36 wide-ranging variations and more than an hour of music, incorporating an array of knuckle-busting complexities as well as whistling and percussive effects that include drumming the Steinway and slamming the piano lid. Rzewski, then 68, brings a composer's innate understanding and blazing musicianship to this astounding work.
`SEVERIN VON ECKARDSTEIN: LIVE IN RECITAL'
If you missed Severin von Eckardstein's impressive debut at the festival a year ago, check it out on a DVD of his Miami Beach recital (VAI, $29.95). The German pianist's performance of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata is sensational, explosive and eloquent, with an unbelievably fast acceleration in the final movement. Eckardstein shows himself a supreme colorist in a selection of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, also serving up a fiery reading of Medtner's Sonata Tragica and a deeply felt take on Janacek's Sonata 1.X.1905. There is also some atmospheric, sensitively colored Scriabin and a surprisingly light-hearted dervish encore of Gottschalk's Tournament Galop. As always in this series, sound quality is excellent, video superb.
-- LAWRENCE A. JOHNSON
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