This is a debut recording from the London Steve Reich Ensemble,
a group founded to perform the music of Steve Reich. The group
says, “By putting particular emphasis on his music while programming
it alongside other repertoire, the ensemble aims to create its
own originality.” In this recording, they present three works
from two different periods of Reich’s career.
The first work, Sextet, was
composed in 1984, and is a small-ensemble work for percussion
instruments. It features the type of canonical music that Reich
explored in Six Pianos, where “two or three players on
identical instruments substitute beats for rests to build up
repeating patterns in canon with each other.” This work, in
five movements, has the rhythm that is familiar in Reich’s music,
and the type of melodic structures that he used in his compositions
of this period. This recording is a minute longer than Reich’s
own Nonesuch recording, and notably eschews synthesizers - replacing
them with bowed vibraphones. The sound here is excellent, giving
the ensemble a luscious audio presence.
Piano Phase is one of Reich’s more experimental
works, where two pianos play similar music then fall out of
phase; that is, one plays slightly later than another. As the
phasing shifts the pianos sound as though they are chasing each
other. This is a difficult work to perform, and here it comes
off very well, with, again, excellent sound and presence. However,
this work is seven minutes shorter than Reich’s own recording,
though the notes don’t say anything about what was cut. One
must assume that these are simply repeats that were not performed,
but this is just a guess.
The final work on this disc, Eight
Lines, is a re-orchestration of Octet, a work
that Reich recorded for ECM in 1980. The LP containing this
work was the second ECM recording, and one that helped Steve
Reich develop a following beyond the usual avant-garde performance
spaces. (I heard these works performed at New York’s Bottom
Line, a “cabaret”, which saw, around the same time, concerts
by Lou Reed and Dire Straits.) Scored for ten instruments (two
string quartets, two pianos, two flutes (doubling on piccolos)
and two clarinets (doubling on bass clarinets), this piece is
rhythmic and melodic, much different from Piano Phase or
some of Reich’s earlier, more experimental output. It is, in
fact, one of the most accessible of Reich’s works of this period,
similar in tone to Music for 18 Musicians, and featuring
foot-tapping melodies. While the sound here is excellent again,
I’m partial to the earlier ECM and Nonesuch recordings (the
former called Octet, the latter Eight Lines),
which have a less rushed feeling to them. But this remains an
excellent performance, and, again, wins out by the spaciousness
of the sound.
All in all, this excellent recording may
help people discover the intriguing music of Steve Reich, and
one hopes this ensemble will continue to record it. As the composer
says in the liner-notes, this is “an outstanding group of young
musicians” and “These performances pulse with life.”
Kirk McElhearn
