The People United Will Never Be Defeated

The Tanglewood Learning Institute presents The People United Will Never Be Defeated with Stephen Drury, Instrumental Faculty with the Tanglewood Music Center.

The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1975) is a piano composition by American composer Frederic Rzewski, a set of 36 variations on the Chilean song “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” by Sergio Ortega and Quilapayún.

Ortega (1938-2003) was a classically trained composer and sound engineer, a composition professor, and director of the television station run by the Universidad de Chile and a strong musical voice of the Chilean left. His amthem, ¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido! (The People United Will Never Be Defeated) became the anthem of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular.

In 1975, Rzewski – who counted Ortega among his close friends – composed a set of 36 variations on the song, in tribute.

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Pianist and conductor Stephen Drury has performed throughout the world with a repertoire that stretches from Bach to Liszt to the music of today. He has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Barbican Centre and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and from Arkansas to Seoul.

A champion of contemporary music, he has taken the sound of dissonance into remote corners of Pakistan, Greenland and Montana. In 1985 Stephen Drury was chosen by Affiliate Artists for its Xerox Pianists Program, and performed in residencies with symphony orchestras in San Diego, Cedar Rapids, San Angelo, Spokane, and Stamford.

He has since performed or recorded with the American Composers Orchestra, the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Radio Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Boston Philharmonic, the Boston Pops, the Springfield (Massachusetts) and Portland (Maine) Symphony Orchestras, and the Romanian National Symphony. Drury was a prize-winner in the Carnegie Hall/Rockefeller Foundation Competitions in American Music, and was selected by the United States Information Agency for its Artistic Ambassador Program and a 1986 European recital tour.

A second tour in the fall of 1988 took him to Pakistan, Hong Kong, and Japan. He gave the first piano recitals ever in Julianehaab, Greenland, and Quetta, Pakistan. In 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Drury a Solo Recitalist Fellowship which funded residencies and recitals of American music for two years. The same year he was named “Musician of the Year” by the Boston Globe.

Stephen Drury’s performances of music written in the last hundred years, ranging from the piano sonatas of Charles Ives to works by György Ligeti, Frederic Rzewski and John Cage have received the highest critical acclaim. Drury has worked closely with many of the leading composers of our time, including Cage, Ligeti, Rzewski, Steve Reich, Olivier Messiaen, John Zorn, Luciano Berio, Helmut Lachenmann, Christian Wolff, Jonathan Harvey, Michael Finnissy, Lee Hyla and John Luther Adams.