Stephane Ginsburgh

&

Jan Rzewski

C0N10UR opens and closes with the live performance of musical pieces by the American composer Frederic Rzewski (1938–2021).

Coming Together from 1971 is a poetic-political piece for voice and instruments, inspired by an uprising in the New York state prison of Attica. The piece can be performed by any number of musicians, and they can choose their own instruments. The score indicates only the driving bass line that impels the performance. Specific instructions give the other players a degree of freedom in what they play within a framework that drastically limits their choices. This classic of repetitive music oscillates between composition and improvisation, between anger, hope, and sorrow. For this performance, Stephane Ginsburgh takes his place behind the piano and Jan Rzewski plays the saxophone.

In 1992, Rzewski – who taught at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Liege from 1977 to 2003 and commuted between Rome and Brussels mainly for all those years – composed De Profundis (from the depths), for piano and voice. In this monumental musical drama, Stephane Ginsburgh recites excerpts from the eponymous letter Oscar Wilde wrote from prison to his beloved Lord Alfred Douglas in 1897.