Doug Fields wrote, on Monday, June 25, 2001, at 20:46:

>Has anyone heard a young American pianist named Roger Wright? I was
>tremendously impressed by a recording I found by word of mouth, and bought.
>Quite a wonderful player, though some of the 20th century music on the
>disc put out by ABC Classics was not familiar to me.  Someone told me he
>competed in the Van Cliburn Competition recently, and that his recitals
>were broadcast.  Does anyone know anything about this?

Doug, sorry to be so late on this.  I remembered your question while
responding in another forum tonight and wanted to include some of that
here, to your question.

In the Cliburn competition in June, one of the most popular works was
Frederic Rzewski's 'Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues from North American
Ballads.' This reflected the sounds and repetition and stifling atmosphere
of that kind of life.

You can hear that performance (by Roger Wright) direct at

   http://www.webcasting.com/vc/vcram20.ram

and this piece starts at 21 minutes and 30 seconds of the Real Audio
playback of that entire session.

The page of preliminary rounds archives is at:

   http://www.webcasting.com/vc/prelimscores.htm

While Olga Kern and Stanislav Ioudenitch shared the Gold first prize,
and their competition recordings were the two best-selling CDs in the
competition store, Wright's Cotton Mill session was the 3rd highest-
selling CD there despite the fact he didn't make it into the semi-finals
due probably to nervousness in the Chopin sonata that followed immediately
upon the tumult of shouts that erupted after his Cotton Mill Blues and
perhaps too much unconventional rubato in that Chopin for conservative
judges.  Anyway, his Cotton Mill Blues is terrific.  So was his Haydn.

An interesting player, he was also knocked out before semi-finals in the
Australian competition (the CD you have), but the critics, the competition
announcer, the audience, and the competition broadcasting company (ABC)
were so put out by that turn of events, that ABC broadcasting signed him
immediately for a *solo disc* of his pieces from that competition (now on
Eloquence label) while the winners of the competition had to share a disc
of their solo performances.

In addition to the full preliminary rounds set by him available at the
Cliburn site (see URL above), there is now a page for him at

  http://mp3.com/rogerwright

I'm not as fond of his Rachmaninoff PC3 but there are some interesting free
recordings up there.

  - Andrys
http://andrys.com/find-classical.html
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