London Sinfonietta/Sound Intermedia - Reich/Richter (Royal Festival Hall, London, 6 April 2023)

Concert from earlier in the month, broadcast last week.  The mouthwatering programme is themed around New York composers, or those with connections to the area, its second half given over to 40 minutes of Steve Reich.

First, we get the transformed Insect sounds of Mira Calix's Nunu; the world premiere of Anna Clyne's Fractured Time, and the joyous cacophony of Julia Wolfe's Tell Me Everything, inspired by a tape of Mexican brass music.  Bookending these in the concert's first half are two arrangements of an uncharacteristically brief Julius Eastman piece, Joy Boy from 1974.  Opening the programme in a wind-centred iteration, then leading into the interval in a strings-based version, it's a great pocket-sized example of the subtle constant transformation in Eastman's music.  

Reich/Richter, composed in 2019 and given album release last year, was composed by Steve Reich to accompany an abstract film by Gerhard Richter.  The patterned, textured film was shown to the audience for this performance, but with this obviously unavailable to broadcast listeners the music has to stand by itself.  And it most certainly does, in instantly recognisable Reich form across its four sections, but still managing to sound fresh in this late period of the New York legend's career.

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pw: sgtg

Steve Reich - Music For 18 Musicians (1978)

Steve Reich's big break, both in terms of drawing together all his compositional ideas up until then into a masterpiece, and also in the public consciousness, this ECM release reaching his widest audience yet.  Deutsche Grammophon were actually responsible for this premiere recording, and had been sitting on it for a year or two when Manfred Eicher spotted its potential.  The 56-minute continuous piece became a hit with audiences who heard a warmth and accessibility that until then wasn't generally associated with the more austere forms of minimal music.

 

Music For 18 Musicians starts by setting out the pulse that will sustain it for the duration, as well as the sequence of eleven chords that will be slowly cycled through in its subsequent sections.  Arch forms, organum and cantus inspired by Perotin and section cues on the metallophone inspired by gamelan music all give the music its gorgeous symmetry.  Phrase lengths are determined by the bass clarinetist and human voices, dependent upon how long they can breathe for, adding to the organic feel of the music as if the whole ensemble were one living, breathing organism.  Section VI, at the 31 minute mark, is always my favourite in its joyous rhythmic/vocal focus, but Music For 18 Musicians is always best experienced as a whole.  Back in the vinyl era, this ran up against the same problem as E2-E4 later would, namely that flipping the record over temporarily broke the spell, but in the digital era there's no such drawback as it all runs in one sublime track.

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
Drumming, Six Pianos etc
Octet etc
Tehilim
Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards
Vermont Counterpoint / Eight Lines

The Desert Music
Sextet / Six Marimbas + bonus concert feat. Music For 18 Musicians
Nagoya Marimbas

City Life

Reich, Glass, Nancarrow et al performed by London Sinfonietta (BBC Proms 2020)

A programme of "pulsing cityscapes" from the London Sinfonietta, recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall sans audience on Tuesday 1 September.  Some wonderful, ear-bending sounds came out of this - as soon as the stately chords of Glass' Facades fade away, what comes next is a miniature for toy piano and toy boombox.  This piece is East Broadway by Julia Wolfe, one of the Bang On A Can founders - after her grand epic Flower Power earlier this year, it was nice to hear the contrast of something so brief and bizarre.

Orchestral arrangements of two of Conlon Nancarrow's Studies For Player Piano follow, with the expanded instrumentation really highlighting the fiendish complexity of Nancarrow's writing.  A spotlight for three more contemporary composers is next, with Tansy Davies' funk-influenced Neon, Edmund Finnis' renaissance/baroque-cut-and-paste In Situ and Anna Meredith's distorted bassoon piece Axeman.  The finale is Steve Reich's City Life, which more than ably demonstrates its title in the trademark pulse and orchestration, and in the sampled sounds from the streets of NYC.  These include voices used both in the style of Different Trains, where the cadence of the speech informs the melody, and in phased overlays like his early work Come Out.

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pw: sgtg

Steve Reich - The Desert Music (1985)

Steve Reich kicked off his relationship with Nonesuch, which continues to this day, in grand style.  The Desert Music, composed 1982-84, augmented his usual ensemble with the chorus and members of the Brooklyn Philharmonic.  The sung text is extracted from William Carlos Williams' poems Theocritus: Idyl I, The Orchestra and Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.  It was Reich's most ambitious work so far, and remains one of his most impressive and thrilling to listen to.  Set in an arch structure, bookended by that trademark Reichian pulse, The Desert Music takes everything Reich had been experimenting with up until the early 80s and creates a true epic journey.

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
Drumming, Six Pianos etc
Octet etc
Tehilim
Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards
Vermont Counterpoint / Eight Lines
Sextet / Six Marimbas + bonus concert feat. Music For 18 Musicians
Nagoya Marimbas

Colin Currie with Sam Walton and Robin Michael - Striking A Balance: Contemporary Percussion Music (1998)

An hour of great marimba & vibraphone-based music, released in 1998 to herald the fresh new talent of percussionist Colin Currie, born right here in Edinburgh in 1976.  The well chosen and sequenced programme takes in big name composers from Bach to Reich, with some lesser known ones in between.

The album starts with its knottiest piece, written by Tosh Ichiyanagi in 1982 as variations on a Caprice by Paganini.  Here, as with about half the album, Currie is accompanied by pianist Robin Michael, who also features on the following quartet of miniatures from Chick Corea's Children's Songs.  Currie is also paired on a few tracks with another marimba player, Sam Walton, resulting in a beautiful Alborada Del Gracioso from Ravel's Miroirs, a little bit of Bach from English Suite No. 2, and Reich's Nagoya Marimbas.  Lovely chilled weekend listening.

Alternate cover

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pw: sgtg

John Adams - Grand Pianola Music / Steve Reich - Vermont Counterpoint, Eight Lines (1985)

Adams & Reich always complement each other well on disc, so here's a great recording from the 80s, originally issued on LP in 1984 without Vermont Counterpoint, then as an expanded CD a year later.  The main work is John Adams' 32-minute Grand Pianola Music, composed in 1981.  The creative spark was a dream Adams had, of being pursued on the interstate by black limousines transforming into pianos.  It does chug along with the lightness of an atmospheric dreamscape, assisted by wordless female voices.  The more forceful third movement gives it a dramatic conclusion.

Steve Reich's Vermont Counterpoint was commissioned in 1982 by flautist Ransom Wilson, who plays it here.  When performed live, the piece can either be played by eleven flutes or a soloist with a tape backing, the parts weaving in and out of each other to create another dreamlike atmosphere.  Closing this collection is Eight Lines, which was a slightly rewritten version of Octet from Reich's time at ECM (see links below).  The main difference is that Eight Lines doubles the string quartet to make performance easier; this is a fine version, but I think I prefer the original, maybe just from familiarity.

Original CD cover, 1985

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pw: sgtg

John Adams at SGTG:
The Chairman Dances, etc
Road Movies, etc
Harmonium etc (scroll past main post)
Steve Reich at SGTG:
Drumming, Six Pianos etc
Octet etc
Tehilim
Sextet/Six Marimbas + bonus concert feat. Music For 18 Musicians
Adams & Reich:
Variations/Shaker Loops

Steve Reich - Sextet/Six Marimbas (1986)

This is probably my favourite album from Steve Reich's time on Nonesuch (which continues to this day), with the much more sombre and poignant Different Trains a close second.  The five-movement Sextet, completed in 1985, saw Reich return to the smaller, percussion-based ensemble playing of his work from the previous decade. 

Reich gives this sound a fresh perspective by introducing longer, sustained tones via synth and electric organ, and also bowed vibraphone.  The writing is more chromatic than before, giving it a jazzier hue which is especially effective in the upbeat first movement.  Following Sextet, the album features a rescoring of 1973's Six Pianos for marimba.  A very enjoyable update, Six Marimbas is ten minutes shorter than its progenitor, and creates a much more meditative mood.

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pw: sgtg

Bonus Reich: London Sinfonietta concert

This performance was given last Wednesday at Birmingham Symphony Hall.  Its first half featured the early Reich piece Clapping Music and a much more recent ballet work, Runner.  The second half was given over to a fine rendition of Music For 18 Musicians.  Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.  One mp3 file, no pw, here.

Steve Reich - Tehilim (1982)

Steve Reich's third album in his ECM trilogy, Tehilim (Psalms, sung here in the original Hebrew) for sopranos and ensemble followed up on its predecessor by digging even more explicitly into the composer's cultural and spiritual heritage.  In an interview (scroll to bottom) with Charles Amirkhanian around the time Tehilim was composed, Reich can be heard discussing Judaism becoming more central to his life and his work, and the studies into Torah chanting that he'd been undertaking would find full flower in this, his first vocal work.

The four-part Tehilim on record was, at under half an hour, the shortest LP that ECM had ever released, and I doubt very much they've since released a briefer one.  Huge kudos then to Reich and Eicher for resisting the temptation to pair Tehilim with another work on the album (perhaps there just wasn't one around), as it doesn't need it - it's utterly gorgeous on its own.  The intricate, flowing counterpoints of Part I lead into the heart-bursting wonder of Part II on the album's first side, with the voices perfectly accompanied by mostly just organ, reeds and percussion.

The marimba and strings-underlaid Part III is the shortest part, apparently written by the movement-shunning Reich via the gentle persuasion of conductor Peter Eötvös, before the original percussion picks up again for Part IV's setting of the last Psalm ("praise him on the..." etc), bursting into a final joyous gallop for the final 'hallelujahs'.  Essential, life-affirming Reich.

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Steve Reich - Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards / John Adams - Shaker Loops (rel. 1984)

Steve Reich seems to be everywhere at the moment – I’m certainly not complaining! – so as my own tribute during this, his 80th birthday month, here’s his earliest commissioned orchestral work, Variations For Winds, Strings And Keyboards (1979) in its premiere recording from 1983.

Very much a natural progression from Octet and Music for a Large Ensemble, which were composed around the same time, Variations takes a long, winding melody played on the winds and organ, and periodically anchors it with impressive harmonies in the brass.  Reich’s most ambitious piece of writing yet, it was composed for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra but was first trialled in a scaled-down chamber orchestra setting.  The February 1980 premiere of that version, by Reich’s ensemble was broadcast along with an interview on Charles Amirkhanian’s KPFA Radio programme Other Minds – the whole broadcast recording is available at ubuweb , or if you’d just like to hear the recording of the piece in its original incarnation, dl here.

The accompanying work on this 1984 CD was the orchestral version of John Adams’ Shaker Loops (1978), another key work in the US minimalist canon alongside much of Reich and Glass.  The name comes partly from the inspiration of  the repetitive tape loop music of early Reich, partly from the tremulous, trilling sounds in the strings, and partly from imagining a Shaker church dancing in pursuit of spiritual ecstasy.  The four movements go through a variety of moods and speeds, and the whole work is essential listening in its genre.

A final thought  about this CD itself – that’s got to be one of my favourite classical album covers ever; the modern symmetry of that building suits the musical contents perfectly.  Anyone know where the picture was taken? If the building’s still there?

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Steve Reich - Octet/Music for a Large Ensemble/Violin Phase (rel. 1980)

Steve Reich in 1980 was midway through his ECM tenure, and building on the success of his first stone-cold masterpiece, Music For 18 Musicians.  Its follow-up was this programme of three shorter works, each just over 15 minutes.  One of these wasn't new - Violin Phase was released on the first ever LP of Reich's music in 1968, performed by Paul Zukofsky.  For the 1980 recording by Shem Guibbory, this progressive web of interlocking layers of violin/pre-recorded violin on tape gets a welcome rev-up to the tempo, making the criss-crossing patterns much more effective and shortening it by 8 minutes compared to Zukofsky's recording.

The two freshly-minted works show how far Reich had refined his style since Music For Mallet Instruments, Voices And Organ.  Music For A Large Ensemble does what it says on the tin, with 30 musicians filling out his lushest orchestral work so far, as melody lines gradually increase in complexity during each of the work's four sections.

Octet, again as its name suggests, slims down the ensemble, and for me is the highlight of the album.  From the early 80s onwards, Reich's Jewish identity and cultural heritage would strongly inform his work; this began in earnest with a visit to Jerusalem in 1977 to study cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew scriptures.  The  first influence of this showed up in Octet and its long melodic lines on flute and piccolo, which give the piece its wonderful flowing energy.  I wonder if this work was the one that Reich was (rightfully) most proud of on this release - it comes first in the album title, and I'm guessing was programmed last in the running order just to be a best-fit for the sequencing of the LP.

P.S. If anyone wants to pick up all of Reich's ECM recordings in one handy box, they're being reissued in exactly that way in a few weeks!

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Psappha ensemble - Crumb / Carter / Reich in concert (2016)

This concert was broadcast as part of BBC Radio 3's 'New Year New Music' programme back in January.  I managed to grab a recording, as these shows disappear quickly from the online player, and I've been returning to it ever since - it's too good not to share.  The "artwork" here is by yours truly, after a hard (five minutes) graft on Photoshop.

Taking their name from a Xenakis percussion work, the Psappha contemporary music ensemble are based in Manchester, and so were performing on home turf here for a fantasic programme taking in three great American composers of the 20th century.  George Crumb's Quest (completed 1994), for percussion, harp, double bass, soprano sax and solo guitar opens the proceedings on an eerie, understated note, sounding like a guitarist trying to practice in a haunted orchestra pit.

The Crumb work is the definite highlight of the concert for me; Eliot Carter's Triple Duo (1982-3) that follows is a bit less accessible, with complex tangles of duo parts interweaving and sometimes clashing with each other, but it's still a fascinating listen and worth perservering with.  Lastly, Psappha turn in an energetic, swinging performance of Steve Reich's Double Sextet (2007) - doubled in this instance by the fact that it's being played live to a recording of itself. I don't always get as much out of latter-day Reich as I do from his 70s-80s work, but this is an enjoyable listen and closes the evening perfectly.

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Bonus Public Service Announcement
I always intended to keep this blog strictly apolitical...
I am proud to be Scottish today (and half Northern Irish by parentage).
Music still transcends all boundaries - any English or Welsh visitors to this blog, I bear you no ill will, and don't intend to enact any petty boycotts, either in the music I buy or music I post here.
I think we all know deep down though that the flag that united our four countries for so long will, within most of our lifetimes, only be seen in museums.  I say that with neither glee nor sorrow, just a simple statement of inevitability.
That is all - thanks
A

Steve Reich - Drumming/Six Pianos/Music For... (rec. 1974)

Steve Reich's earliest large-scale work, Drumming was composed following a 1970 trip to Ghana to learn from a master percussionist.  Having notated some of the massively complex drum patterns that he'd heard, Reich decided that this was the way to go forward with the interlocking phase patterns that he'd already tried out on a smaller scale.

As with most of Reich's music, from the 70s in particular, Drumming is just a simple joy to listen to and get lost in the gradually shifting patterns.  Starting off with tuned bongo drums that continually hint at melody, the second section uses the same rhythms but scored for marimbas.  This part of Drumming is my absolute favourite, especially the two major changes to the patterns at the 8 and a half minute mark and again at the 20 minute mark.  The third section takes the music up a register with tinkling glockenspiels, followed by a finale with the whole ensemble.

These recordings were originally released in 1974 as a 3LP set on Deutsche Grammophon - one of the advantages of the CD era is that you can listen to Drumming Pts. 1-3 uninterrupted, rather than changing vinyl sides for each one.  The supporting pieces are the self-descriptive Six Pianos - try it with some sort of reverb effect to approximate the intermingling sound that Reich was aiming for in a large concert hall - and then a final ensemble work that doesn't really go anywhere, but does it very nicely and soothingly. Music For Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ is actually the most prescient pointer to where Reich was about to go in the years that followed, in much more accomplished forms.

Disc 1
Disc 2