Complete Piano

Minimalism has been dominated by heterosexual white men - Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass - so Eastman, a black gay, is an essential complement to the whole style image, even if his approach was specific and perhaps ahead of his time, wrote New York Times in 2016. Another left-wing whim New York snobs are indulging in? Not necessarily. Since the publication of this opinion, Julius Eastman's work, forgotten for a quarter of a century, has become the center of attention of the London Contemporary Music Festival, MaerzMusik in Berlin and the Sacrum Profanum festival in Krakow, as well as reaching the opinion-forming press on both sides of the Atlantic. Now you can listen to new versions of Eastman's most famous work (under the provocative title Evil Nigger) that have just been released. Cascades of sounds, usually generated by four pianos, this time enlivened the famous Arditti String Quartet (arranged by Tomasz Opałka) and two Polish accordion masters, Rafał Łuc and Maciej Frąckiewicz (arranged by Piotr Peszat).