…(Rzewski) stands in an honorable line of barnstorming pianist-composers that includes Chopin, Liszt, Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff. He is a daredevil pianist…and one of the three or four most significant composers for the piano in the past half-century.

…he's all about vitality, articulation, attack, rhythm, and total emotional engagement. His way of playing is authoritative and compelling, but the music also stands up to very different kinds of artistic temperament and ways of investigation - one sure guarantee of its quality. Rzewski's music is in and of the moment, but he also built it to last.

...try listening to a few minutes of Rzewski performing his addictive "The People United Will Never Be Defeated" and see if you can stop the CD player...

Rzewski develops a series of variations so astonishingly original in sound and idea that you can't imagine what he will do next. In the course of an hour, he just keeps topping himself.

...it would be hard to find a composer today who employs a more extensive working knowledge of Western tradition for his own music, to say nothing of a classical composer who is a more thrilling pianist or improviser.

It sounds like no other music because it is made like no other music, Rzewski has found a way to be recklessly free and rigorously controlled, to be fervent populist and master of the arcane, at the same time.

Rzewski is, in all he writes, a grippingly dramatic composer...

Two things are clear from these performances (newly recorded in 199 and 2000). Mr. Rzewski knows and loves the piano, and is a formidable pianist. Maybe even an awesome one, it would be fascinating to hear him in more standard Eurocentric repertory.

…gorgeous, imaginative music by one of the deepest, most creative and — in the true sense of the word — most Romantic composers alive.

…no other living composer gives you such a strong impression that you're listening to him think…he's something of a postmodern Charles Ives…

There is always a thread to follow that seems strikingly analogous to a train of thought, now rushing, now hesitant, now interrupting itself to take apart what you've just heard and put it back together differently before trying a new direction.

Pounding blues dissolve into modernist 12-tone rows, folk songs fracture, scramble and split only to be sewn back together again; rich, full runs up and down the length of the keyboard are suddenly displaced by sparse Feldman-like single notes.

…one of the most technically proficient pianists I've ever seen…

…often one forgets to notice whether the music is tonal or atonal, because what makes it connect is the high pressure of similar intervallic shapes chasing one another.

…a deadly serious artist whose every fiber seems to bristle with attitude…a composer with abundant resources and a sense as to how to apply these to his consistently uncompromising outlook.