| Contemporary music |
Walton Lott – Impulses (Neuma Records): Rzewski and Harbison Through the Hands of a Master
From its opening bars, Impulses, the solo recording from Colorado-based pianist Walton Lott is direct, committed and purposeful. The work of a musician who knows exactly why he has chosen these pieces and exactly what he wants to say through them.
The pairing at the heart of the record is a bold one: Frederic Rzewski’s Four Pieces for Piano (1977) alongside John Harbison’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (2001). Both composers were born in 1938, both are towering figures in American new music, and yet their voices could hardly be more different: Rzewski restless, politically charged, volatile, and Harbison architectural, lyrical, rooted in a kind of New England classicism that traces its lineage back through Charles Ives. Placing them side by side is not merely a programming decision but an argument, and Lott makes it compellingly across just over an hour of music.
Frederic Rzewski – Four Pieces for Piano (1977)
The Four Pieces sit chronologically between the composer’s two most celebrated works, The People United Will Never Be Defeated! and North American Ballads, and while they operate more abstractly than either, they are unmistakably cut from the same cloth. Political struggle, social observation, the tension between order and eruption: all of it is here, translated into purely musical terms.
The first piece, Dreamlike: Violent, Impulsive, does exactly what its title promises, and then some. An invented Andean-inflected melody, sparse and searching, is shattered by explosive percussive outbursts before the music finds its way back to an uneasy stillness. Lott plays it with extraordinary range, from whispered upper-register figures to thunderous bass attacks, his touch calibrated at every moment to the music’s shifting emotional temperature.
Light + Bouncy provides contrast without relaxing the tension, playful, darting, rhythmically alive, but always with something restless lurking beneath the surface wit.
Loosely, with Feeling is the emotional and expressive centre of the four pieces, and Lott’s finest moment: spacious, contemplative, allowing silence and resonance to function as expressive forces in their own right, before building with patient inevitability toward passages of real intensity.
The fourth and final piece, pointedly untitled, as if to refuse easy resolution, gathers the cycle’s recurring energies into a toccata-like momentum before dissolving into a single repeated note, a questioning silence that Lott sustains with complete conviction. “What is to be done?”, the music seems to ask. It is a genuinely powerful conclusion, and one that lands differently depending on the world you carry into the listening.
John Harbison – Piano Sonata No. 2 (2001)
Where Rzewski reaches outward toward politics and society, Harbison turns inward. His Piano Sonata No. 2, written for legendary pianist Robert Levin for the memorable sum of one dollar, is a four-movement work of contrapuntal clarity and expressive depth, formal in its architecture, but never cold.
The Intrada opens with resonant, bell-like chords that give way to searching melodic ideas, and Lott immediately finds the right balance between the movement’s weightier declarations and its more transparent, intimate passages.
The Aria is perhaps the album’s most immediately beautiful music, gentle melodic lines floating above carefully voiced harmonies, darker interjections kept carefully in check, and Lott shapes every phrase with a patience and elegance that feels entirely natural.
The Ricercare is brisk and contrapuntally intricate, a lively conversation between contrasting musical ideas that Lott navigates with crystalline articulation and infectious momentum.
And the closing Variazioni is a small masterpiece of restraint: rather than a virtuoso finale, Harbison offers a series of increasingly reflective transformations that settle gradually into quiet contemplation. Lott responds with exceptional sensitivity, finding the beauty in each variation without forcing anything, and bringing the album to a close that feels genuinely earned.
What distinguishes Impulses from a mere display of pianistic accomplishment is Lott’s consistent commitment to meaning over effect. He brings formidable technique to both scores, that much is immediately clear, but technique is never the point. Whether navigating Rzewski’s political turbulence or Harbison’s refined lyricism, he remains above all a storyteller, alert to the larger dramatic arc of each work and willing to trust silence, restraint and understatement as much as power and brilliance.
Lott himself has spoken of his pleasure in performing “within a wide range of musical genres and contexts” and his hunger to “connect with the musical community”, and that open, curious, generous spirit is audible throughout Impulses.
This is contemporary American piano music played with the advocacy it deserves, by a musician clearly devoted to keeping it alive and in conversation with audiences who may not yet know they need it.
A very fine album. Highly recommended.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, August 3rd, 2026
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To buy the album on Neuma Records website
Musician:
Walton Lott, Piano
Tracklisting:
Frederic Rzewski – Four Pieces for Piano
- Dreamlike: Violent, Impulsive 9:43
- Light + Bouncy 6:57
- Loosely, with feeling 11:46
- 7:44
John Harbison – Piano Sonata No. 2
- Intrada 6:43
- Aria 6:10
- Ricercare 4:20
- Variazioni 7:33
Credits:
Jonathan Galle: Recording Engineer, Producer
Scott Burgess: Audio Editor
Philip Blackburn: Design
Walton Lott: Four Pieces by Frederick Rzewski
(Performed at the Southeastern Composers League 2014 Forum, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga)