The title of this album refers to the Yiddish word Mensch: literally “a human being,” but in everyday use someone who acts with integrity, awareness and responsibility. For Frederic Rzewski, the term carried exactly this meaning. A Mensch is not a perfect person, but someone  who remains fully human—capable of doubt, contradiction and critical thought, and resistant to becoming passive within larger societal systems.This idea runs quietly but consistently through his work. The pieces brought together here span more than sixty years, from the early 1950s to the last decade of his life, forming a kind of timeline across his career. The musical language changes, sometimes radically, but the underlying concerns remain strikingly constant. Rzewski’s music engages with literature, politics and history, often through concrete  situations—prison, injustice, personal crisis—but never in an abstract or detached way. The question is always how individuals relate to these forces, and whether they can remain human within them. In that sense, the ethical dimension of the Yiddish Mensch is not just a title, but something that can be heard throughout the programme. 

Taken as a whole, this recording traces a composer who never gave up on the idea that music can carry meaning beyond itself. Across decades of work, his voice remains clear in its insistence that art can still ask what it means to live—and to act—as a human being.

Booklet: EN