Reich reviews

Reich reviews

Timelapse

Orchestra of the Swan, et al (Signum Classics)
more

I Still Play

Jeremy Denk, Timo Andres, et al (piano) (Nonesuch)
more

Reich: Pulse; Quartet

International Contemporary Ensemble and Colin Currie Group (Nonesuch)
more

Reich: Drumming

Colin Currie Group and Synergy Vocals (Colin Currie Records)
more

SoftLOUD
: Music for Acoustic & Electric Guitars

Sean Shibe (Delphian)
more

Steve Reich's Double Sextet and Radio Rewrite performed by the Ensemble Signal

more

Steve Reich's Sextet, Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood

more

Third Coast Percussion present Reich chamber works

Third Coast Percussion represents the third generation of performers to present Reich, impressively combining creative fearlessness with reverent precision. In Nagoya Marimbas tight-knit geometry releases free-wheeling exuberance. In this graceful, subtly nuanced performance, phrases are shaped with waves of minutely controlled dynamics: you won’t hear such luminously-voiced pianissimo even on the fine original recording (Nonesuch).

more

Reich

It’s fascinating when a performance tradition of a relatively new work begins to evolve. I say new, but Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1974-76) is nearing 40. Since Reich’s own pioneering recording of that seminal work (on Nonesuch) there have been at least five other recordings before this one. The young musicians in Ensemble Signal weren’t even born when it was composed, though they’re directed by Reich’s colleague Brad Lubman.

more

Reich

Steve Reich first heard Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood perform Electric Counterpoint in Kraków at a 2010 festival of Reich’s music. That meeting inspired Radio rewrite, a five-part work that takes as its starting point two Radiohead songs, Jigsaw Falling into Place and Everything in its Right Place. Scored for chamber ensemble including pianos and vibraphones, and with contrasting fast-slow movements, his first foray into rock is instantly recognisable as Reich.

more

Reich • Barber • Crumb

Samuel Barber, a conservative Romantic at heart, wouldn’t have relished sharing a disc with Steve Reich and George Crumb, leading figures in the stream of new music that swept him aside at the end of his life. And none of the trio, I hope, would approve of the CD’s provocative cover image: part of a bleak Stanley Kubrick photograph of a man and gun, aiming at a police van’s grill. The Quatuor Diotima’s vision of American music clearly doesn’t include the pastoral, the visionary, or Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

more

Reich: WTC 9/11

Reich has never been shy of political engagement, from his early tape masterpiece, Come Out (1966), via such works as Different Trains (1988), the multimedia project The Cave (1990-93), and the Daniel Variations (2006), right up to this Reflection on the 2001 Attacks on the World Trade Center. WTC 9/11 continues Reich’s association with the Kronos Quartet, begun with Different Trains, and uses similar techniques, interweaving music for multi-tracked string quartet with rhythmic fragments of speech from which motifs for the quartet are derived.

more

Steve Reich: Phase to Face

Reich is an engaging guide to his own music, though its slow-moving processes aren’t best illustrated by the brief excerpts from rehearsals and performances. Two bonus tracks of Reich talking. Anthony Burton
 

more

Reich: The Desert Music; Three Movements

 

more

Reich: Double Sextet

Steve Reich admits he no longer feels the need to reinvent himself, and trusts that his familiar technique of building layered patterns over a driving beat, with constantly shifting accents, will yield some surprises.

more

Reich: Daniel Variations; Variations for Vibes, Pianos and strings.

The Daniel Variations is a moving, unsettling tribute to Daniel Pearl, the Jewish-American journalist abducted and murdered by Islamicist extremists in 2002. Reich sets texts from the Book of Daniel and, in the second and fourth parts, Pearl’s own words. The second takes the statement ‘My Name is Daniel Pearl’ from the kidnappers’ video, an uneasy echo of Reich’s early tape work, My Name Is, with the phrase in an entirely different context.
more

Reich: Sextet; Piano phase; Eight lines

These performances have the composer’s approval (he says they ‘pulse with life’ and praises the LSRE’s ‘superb feel’) but they also have stiff competition. Piano Phase, one of Reich’s earliest pieces, applies the phasing technique developed through tape works to live performance: one pianist gradually moves a beat ahead of the other until arriving back in unison. This version is considerably shorter than that by Double Edge (Nonesuch) and some people may regard that as a plus-point.
more

Reich, Mellits

There are now numerous recordings of Different Trains, including a fine interpretation by the Smith Quartet on Signum, but despite the piece’s passage into the repertoire they not unreasonably tend to be judged against the Kronos Quartet’s premier recording.
more

Adams, Glass, Heath, Reich: find works

A classic release in which Warren- Green and his colleagues play with such passion and commitment that any Minimalist doubters will be swept along with them. Spotlessly engineered.
more

Steve Reich

These – a retrospective box set and a new ‘single’ – are released to mark Steve Reich’s 70th birthday on 3 October. To tidy things up for collectors, despite a high content overlap the Phases retrospective is not exactly a rehash of the 1997 Works boxed set, which was twice the size of this rather more apprehensible selection, and Reich: Remixed 2006 is an entirely different recording from the original Reich: Remixed of 1999. Two out of the three pieces on 2006 were also remixed on the 1999 disc, but of course different mixes/
more

Glass; Reich

The dance/opera work Les Enfants Terribles is already available on Orange Mountain in its original version for three pianos and voices. This is a deft two-piano arrangement by the performers of six non-vocal scenes which forms part of their repertoire as a piano duo, with the robustness of the original material making it highly amenable to such
more

Reich: You Are (Variations)

As titles go, You Are (Variations) doesn’t exactly set the pulse racing – but then Steve Reich has never been much good at fashioning clever titles (which for me is definitely a point in his favour). This new piece, premiered in 2004, is a setting of four texts of gnomic profundity; the first, from the writings of an 18th-century rabbi, says ‘You are wherever your thoughts are’ (thus the title).
more

Reich: Triple Quartet; Different Trains; Duet

Back in the 1960s Steve Reich hit on a marvellously simple idea. He noticed that if a fragment of recorded interview was looped and repeated, a melodic pattern would mysteriously emerge from it. In Different Trains, written in 1988, he elaborated on this idea, taking phrases from interviews with travellers and train staff and weaving them into a continuous musical texture of live and pre-recorded string quartets. The effectiveness of the piece hinges on the audibility of the process.
more

Reich: Different Trains; Triple Quartet; The Four Sections

Different Trains began life as a composition for string quartet and tape, with much of the latter comprising additional string parts which are here ‘unzipped’ and arranged for string orchestra. The original recording benefits from the contained intensity of the pre-recorded sections, but as this version progresses, the realisation hits that the work is in fact highly effective in its reworked form, its new-found multidimensionality giving a sense of liberation with no hint of the over-egging that can so easily detract from such experiments.
more
This website is owned and published by Our Media Ltd. www.ourmedia.co.uk
© Our Media 2024