Matching his music to visible pictures isn't a brand new departure for Steve Reich. His two video operas, The Cave and Three Tales, composed along with his spouse, the video artist Beryl Korot, had been his most vital achievements of the Nineteen Nineties. However for Reich/Richter, first carried out in 2019 to mark the opening of the Manhattan arts centre The Shed, Reich labored with an current movie, Shifting Image (946-3), which the artist Gerhard Richter had made with the director Corinna Belz.
To coordinate adjustments within the visuals along with his music, Reich labored with a time-coded copy of Richter’s summary movie. The pictures start with easy stripes, which progressively divide and develop into increasingly more complicated, earlier than reversing the method and returning to the stripes with which it started; the music follows that arch-like construction throughout 38 minutes. A few of the opinions of early performances of Reich/Richter discovered it troublesome to understand the visible complexity and the musical processes of the rating concurrently, however Reich all the time supposed his rating for 14 devices (pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, vibraphones and pianos, with string quartet) to have an unbiased life within the live performance corridor, too.
The cool, elegant Ensemble Intercontemporain efficiency, taken from a 2020 Paris live performance, reveals Reich/Richter as considered one of Reich’s most spectacular latest works. Whereas the music begins by mirroring the multiplying processes of Richter’s movie, starting with a two-note semiquaver sample, then shifting to a four-note one and so forth, it quickly abandons that system, introducing longer word values and permitting particular person instrumental strains to “escape” from the pulsing textures. Within the central part, when the movie is at its most intricate, Reich’s music slows to sustained chords, earlier than gathering tempo once more and finally returning to the semiquavers of the opening. If the music by no means fairly achieves the facility and majesty of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, it has one thing of that nice work’s certainty and inevitability, which is greater than sufficient.
This week’s different choose
Reich discusses performing Reich/Richter in Conversations, his just lately printed ebook of dialogues with fellow composers and collaborators compiled throughout the pandemic. The primary and longest of those exchanges is with David Lang, one of many co-founders of the new-music platform Bang on a Can, and the most recent disc of Lang’s personal music can be launched this week, on Pentatone. Assembled over 14 years, The Writings is a group of settings of texts from the Hebrew Bible which might be notably related to holidays; they're enchanted unaccompanied choral items, jewel-like of their crystalline magnificence and carried out with simply the proper diploma of light detachment by Cappella Amsterdam underneath Daniel Reuss.
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