Bruce Wolosoff: Rising Sun Variations
Avie Records

Turn on any classic rock station and at some point the cryptic strains of The Animals' 1964 anthem “House of the Rising Sun,” replete with Eric Burdon's wailing lead, will invariably appear. It's one of those songs that's so penetrated Western culture it might be difficult to find anyone unfamiliar with it. Pianist Bruce Wolosoff was an impressionable nine-year-old when the British rock band's song hit the charts, but, like many, only later discovered its traditional folk melody had been used in many earlier songs, including the eighteenth-century ballad “The Unfortunate Rake.”It wasn't lyrics about a New Orleans bawdy house that appealed to Wolosoff; in an interview included with Rising Sun Variations, he says, “I was just interested in the melody and the chord changes.” And why not, when the iconic theme connects immediately with the listener. That makes it a gold mine for a theme-and-variations project when the melody provides an unshakable anchor capable of withstanding even the most baroque and outlandish variation.

It's a little bit of a side-venture for the New York City-born pianist, who's otherwise written works for solo piano, cello, and string quartet, and collaborated with the late choreographer Ann Reinking on two ballets, The White City, inspired by Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, and A Light in the Dark, based on the lives of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. In 2022, he issued the recording Paradise Found, which paired him with cellist Sara Sant'Ambrogio, that collaboration arriving after an earlier recording of his Concerto for Cello and Orchestra featured her with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. While Rising Sun Variations might seem to come out of left field, it's, in fact, a not unnatural move for someone known for letting other genres seep into his music.

It arose rather unexpectedly, however. As he hunkered down in Shelter Island with his family during the isolating days of the pandemic, Wolosoff found himself playing the song daily to hold onto some semblance of sanity when not otherwise polishing up his catalogue. Spinning variations on the theme, he ended up creating somewhere between 150 and 175 treatments without giving much initial thought about what to do with them. Eventually, he decided to collect them into a single, forty-minute-long piece in the grand tradition of The Goldberg Variations (1741) or Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1976). Thirty-nine variations were chosen from the total, and transitional passages were developed to ease the move from one to the next. There are lyrical and serene renderings as well as barrelhouse ones, and some treatments seem tailor-made for the conservatory concert hall and others a seedy club. To that end, Wolosoff acknowledges the influence of Jelly Roll Morton, Bill Evans, James Booker, Beethoven, Busoni, and others on the work, and one episode could easily have come from the pen of Philip Glass. Prior to its formal documentation, Wolosoff performed the piece in public twice before recording it at Oktaven Audio in Mount Vernon on June 8th, 2024.

Before plunging into the theme and variations, Wolosoff begins with a rather hymnal prelude whose stripped-down chords set the scene by alluding to the melody. In its first voicing, the theme is delivered straight, its drama compact and contained, with the first variation blues-drenched and undergirded by a dark bass pulse. Things quickly turn lyrical with the melody's yearning quality highlighted, after which a nimble-footed treatment segues into others soulful, haunting, hammering, introspective, elegant, pensive, probing, florid, cantabile, and boisterous, some powered by arpeggios and others chords. Whereas the pretty fifteenth feels Schumann-esque, dark rumblings underscore the sixteenth. A jazz feel surfaces in one passage's syncopated swing, rock'n'roll in another, and as the work enters its final laps, the pace slows and the mood turns contemplative—but not before the set-capping appearance of one final barrelhouse treatment.

February 2025