Reich reviews

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.