Walton Lott Delivers the "Impulses" record
- BuzzSlayers
- 12 hours ago
- 2 min read
Walton Lott is not one to shy away from a touch of Modernism. His new album, Impulses, boldly proclaims two monumental piano works that ask enduring questions about music, struggle, and introspection. The album pairs Frederic Rzewski’s rarely-recorded Four Pieces for Piano (1977) with John Harbison’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (2001), offering listeners a journey from volatile political commentary to lyrical classicism.
The album’s centerpiece, Rzewski’s Four Pieces, lands between the composer’s two most famous works — The People United Will Never Be Defeated and North American Ballads. Unlike those explicitly protest-driven pieces, Four Pieces operates more abstractly, though it is “clearly cut from similar cloth,” Lott writes in the liner notes. The work opens with an invented, lilting Andean-inflected melody marked “Dreamlike,” only to be shattered by explosive, improvisatory tumult marked “Violent, Impulsive.”
Lott’s reading emphasizes a narrative of political struggle. “Rzewski shows us that music can take on an observational role,” Lott explains, “shaping political topics into forms mimetic to the often inhumane aspects of our society.” With an Ivesian touch, the album concludes with Rzewski’s ambiguous, questioning silence—a toccata that evaporates into a single repeated note, leaving the listener not with “Can music change the world?” but rather, “What is to be done?”
Complementing Rzewski’s fire is John Harbison’s Piano Sonata No. 2, completed for legendary pianist Robert Levine, written for a modest $1 commission. Harbison – like Rzewski born in 1938 and often called the “elder statesman” of contemporary North American music – balances bold, declamatory gestures with reticent, introspective passages. The sonata’s four movements — Intrada, Aria, Ricercare, and Variazioni — demonstrate Harbison’s trademark contrapuntal clarity, expressive lyricism, and what Lott calls “a handling of form and harmony that places him (again like Charles Ives) in the tradition of New England Classicism.”
Throughout Impulses, Lott brings formidable technique and interpretive depth. He holds a DMA and MM in Keyboard Performance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a BS in Music from Millsaps College. He currently lives, teaches, and performs in Boulder, Colorado, regularly programming works by 20th and 21st century composers.
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