Steve REICH (b. 1936)
Music for Two or More Pianos [10:57]
Eight Lines [17:12]
Vermont Counterpoint [9:53]
New York Counterpoint [12:07]
City Life [24:12]
Jörg Schweinbenz (piano), Anne Parisot, Delphine Roche (flutes), Andrea Nagy (clarinets)
Holst-Sinfonietta/Klaus
Simon (piano)
rec. 24 May 2006, 20 November 2009, 10-11 January 2010, Templestudio, Gerberaustudio and E-Werk, Grosser Sall, Freiburg, Germany.
NAXOS 8.559682 [73:24]
Although these recordings were all made over a decade ago, they are appearing together on CD for the first time as a kind of chronological retrospective of Reich’s music marking his 85th birthday.
“200, 300, 500, 1000 years from now, people will look back at the era of Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez and Eliot Carter as a very strange aberration in the current of musical evolution. There was a period back in the 20th century when composers aggressively destroyed the pulse and aggressively destroyed tonality”; the words of John Adams in a lecture to students at the Eastman School of Music preserved on a scintillating DVD (John Adams: A Portrait and A Concert of American Music – ArtHaus 100322) which should be required viewing for anyone with an interest in the music of the late 20th century. Adams’ ideas were very much shared by Reich who, in the early 1960s, was a student of one of those “aberrations”, Luciano Berio. Suggesting to his teacher than music needed to restore tonality if it was to survive, Reich was told that, if he wanted to write tonal music, he should go ahead. In 1964 he did just that and produced Music for Two or More Pianos. It does not immediately sound like Reich, opening with a vague and reflective passage which is very much in the post-Webern mode. This opening contains the nine chords on which the work is entirely based, and the music is essentially aleatoric; leaving it to the performers to decide how to deal with the multiple repetitions of these chords. But where the music moves into an altogether faster gear, we begin to experience the Reich we all know (and, mostly, love); jazzy rhythms, insistent repetitions, a movement in and out of phase between the performs (two in this instance - Jörg Schweinbenz and Klaus Simon), and unpredictable accentuations of isolated chords. A later move into more experimental territory, using non-standard ways of playing the piano, shows that Reich was still working through ideas derived from his teacher. As a work it does not really hold together, and this is not a performance which is entirely convincing, but as this is the first time this early work has ever appeared on a commercial recording, its historical value far outweighs its musical limitations..
Eight Lines, as we hear it here (a 1983 revision of the Octet of 1979), is classic minimalist Reich, full of nervous energy, busy repetitions of simple figures, easily integrating elements from jazz and rock, and unequivocally tonal. The Holst Sinfonietta rattle and rock their way through it with, perhaps a little less enthusiasm and commitment than Ensemble Modern under Bradley Lubman on RCA (74321664592), but there is plenty of vigour here and it well captures the slightly manic feel of the writing, even if the long over-arching lines get somewhat overwhelmed by the activity going on underneath.
Also notable for its fussy busy-ness, Vermont Counterpoint for flutes and tape lies roughly midway between the composition of the Octet and its subsequent manifestation as Eight Lines. I am not sure this makes a real contribution to the idea of a Reich Retrospective, since it is so very much rooted in the same basic material as Eight Lines, but here flautists Anne Parisot and Delphine Roche present a performance which verges on the mesmerising. This is matched by the slightly later (1985) New York Counterpoint performed here by clarinettist Andrea Nagy and much recording wizardry to create a rich tapestry of clarinet tone coming at you from all sides.
Much of the material in New York Counterpoint found its way into Different Trains, one of the first of a series of compositions in which Reich used the rhythm of speech as a springboard for musical figures. That technique reached its apogee in City Life of 1995, where the five movements are each built on pre-recorded sounds drawn from the rich tapestry of life in New York (a street seller in lower Manhattan, a pile driver, a spoken phrase overheard at an African-American political rally held near New York City Hall, heartbeats, and a variety of phrases spoken over the walkie-talkie radio sets carried by members of the New York City Fire Department on the day the World Trade Center was bombed). The Steve Reich Ensemble gave what must be regarded as the definitive recorded performance on their Nonesuch recording of 1996 (7559-79430-2), and I am not sure that the Holst Sinfonietta stands close comparison with that recording, nor does the Naxos sound have quite the same depth and intensity; but perhaps familiarity with Reich’s style means that this major work no longer has quite the same impact on us as it did almost a quarter of a century ago.
Marc Rochester
