Steve Reich turned 90 on Saturday and on Tuesday evening Soundstreams staged a celebratory concert at Koerner Hall. It began with an unusual performance of Clapping Music. Steve Reich had been filmed in New York playing one part. That was screened while Russell Hartenberger played the other part live on stage. It was simple, effective and very apt.
Next up was In All Your Ways; a new work commissioned by Soundstreams and several other organisations. This was the North American Premier. It’s an interesting piece. Unsurprisingly it uses a lot of tuned percussion which is combined with rather percussive piano to form a kind pulsing, minimalist continuo. Against this a small group of woodwinds and strings surge and back off at intervals. It’s (surprisingly?) lyrical, though that’s probably indicative of a fairly general trend in contemporary music. In any event, the counterplay of the two groups is quite fascinating.
After the interval we got the “classic” 1976 piece Music for 18 Musicians. This is quite a contrast with In All Your Ways. It’s quite theory driven with a set of eleven chords each played at beginning and end and each providing a motif for the following section. Again it’s very heavy on tuned percussion and multiple pianos with four amplified vocalists (barely audible where i was sitting), a few strings and clarinets/bass clarinets. It definitely has a pulsing energy and it’s tremendously virtuosic. But ultimately I found the repeated figures with their small variations palled a bit and thought it less satisfying than the new piece. It may be one of those pieces better listened to stoned; which, let’s face it, was more common in contemporary music concerts in the 1970s than Koerner Hall today. It’s such an interesting journet from the 1976 piece to the new one and says a lot about the evolution of contemporary music.
All in all, I think it was an appropriate way to celebrate the event and it managed in three works to convey a sense of who Steve Reich is as a composer and how he’s evolved.
Photo credit: Cylla von Tiedemann
