Steve Reich

[7/4]

April 19, 2008

Music Review | Eighth Blackbird

A Night of Collaboration and Energetic Activity

By ALLAN KOZINN, NYT

You can measure a new-music group’s success by the composers it commissions. When Eighth Blackbird began performing, in 1996, its repertory consisted largely of revivals of older scores and works by young composers in the early stages of their careers. The group has not forsaken those composers, nor has it given up curatorial programming completely, but the program it played at Zankel Hall on Thursday evening showed that it is now in another league.

All the music was commissioned by the group, with the first half devoted to the vigorous “Double Sextet” (2007) by Steve Reich and the second to “Singing in the Dead of Night” (2008), an energetic and occasionally spooky collaboration by David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, the composers who run Bang on a Can.

Mr. Reich’s work is the latest in his series of scores for two or more soloists — or, in this case, ensembles. The players have the choice of performing all the parts onstage or recording one set and playing the rest live. Most musicians take the second option, as Eighth Blackbird did: in any case the spirit of these works is bound up in the juxtaposition of real players and their simulacra.

The “Double Sextet” begins with Mr. Reich’s signature chugging rhythms but quickly moves a fair distance, as intricate rhythmic counterpoint and thickening harmonies displace the repetitive opening figure. Parts of the score are almost episodic, with distinct shifts of mood set apart by percussive full stops. In one fleeting passage a lyrical violin-cello duet over a hazy accompaniment sounded like a lightly distorted glimpse into a 19th-century European ballroom. That didn’t last long: Mr. Reich’s insistent rhythms quickly returned, restoring the work to its contemporary moorings.

“Singing in the Dead of Night” is the overall title for the works by Mr. Lang (“These Broken Wings”), Mr. Gordon (“The Light of the Dark”) and Ms. Wolfe (“Singing in the Dead of Night”), and it offers a choice as well: the pieces can be played separately or, as they were here, in a unified 50-minute production. The titles are all taken from the Beatles’ song “Blackbird,” but the tune itself is not quoted. Instead, Mr. Lang provides a three-movement work with virtuosic and sometimes subtly comic outer movements and a slow, eerie middle section.

Mr. Gordon’s and Ms. Wolfe’s scores, interposed among these movements, in some ways match their impulses. Mr. Gordon’s piece continues the rambunctiousness of Mr. Lang’s opening movement, upping the ante by having the musicians play additional instruments, including accordion and harmonica, usually with an aggressive edge. And Ms. Wolfe’s work expands on the melancholy edge of Mr. Lang’s middle movement, gradually picking up speed, heft and lyricism.

The performance, virtuosic, polished and played largely from memory, was choreographed by Susan Marshall with an amusing quirkiness that reflected the music’s energy.

Edited May 14, 2008 by 7/4

[Mark Stryker]

If anyone's interested, here's my take on the program, which Eighth Blackbird performed in Ann Arbor a week prior to the NY concert.

Mature Eighth Blackbird flies high: Ensemble performs beyond the fringe

BYLINE: Mark Stryker, Detroit Free Press

Apr. 12--It's been a thrill for metro Detroiters to watch Eighth Blackbird grow into a leading new music ensemble, because we've known about the group's charisma and skill longer than most. The sextet made its local debut at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in 1997, a year after its founding at the Oberlin Conservatory.

Earlier this year the group won a Grammy award for its CD "Strange Imaginary Animals" and on Thursday reached another milestone, a University Musical Society debut. The ambitious program featured music premiered last month. Steve Reich's "Double Sextet" found the ensemble performing live with a prerecorded tape of itself. "Singing in the Dead of Night" is a collaboration by the three founding composers of New York's Bang on a Can, David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, with restrained but effective choreography by Susan Marshall.

The chain of influences was alluring. Reich, 71, is a founding hero of minimalism, whose pulsating rhythmic grids, spare harmonies, vernacular leanings and self-reliant spirit left a huge imprint on the post-classical aesthetic of Bang on a Can, whose do-it-yourself model has inspired young ensembles like Eighth Blackbird.

"Double Sextet" features Reich's trademark gleaming surfaces and phase-shifting rhythms, but there is also the sneaky melodic lushness that has crept into his music in recent decades. Piano and vibes (and their taped counterparts) acted a rhythm section, creating a web of head-bobbing, asymmetric rhythms. Violin, flute, clarinet and cello laid slowly revolving melodies on top, creating a glint so bright you almost needed sunglasses. In the slow movement, piano and vibes merged into a pool of open harmony and the melody took on a beautiful yearning quality that reminded me of a meditative John Coltrane ballad.

The performance had energy but felt a bit stiff, as if the players were still settling into the work, and the impact would have been greater if the tape had been louder. The piece sounded less like a dialogue between equals than a live sextet with taped accompaniment.

In "Singing in the Dead of Night," three sections by Lang surround movements by Gordon and Wolfe. The best music came from Lang (who won a Pulitzer for another piece this week). The bright and prickly mix of piccolo and glockenspiel and the complex rhythms in his prologue suggested Oliver Messiaen's birds with a groove, while the bell-like tolls in his central movement had the quiet intensity of poetry. Gordon's agitated movement pitted jaunty fiddling and woodwind jamming against a sliding cello, humorously sudden percussive clangs and even a touch of harmonica and accordion. Wolfe's night music started promisingly but seemed overly long.

The music had a tactile quality that merged comfortably with Marshall's staging. There were two especially memorable moments of theater. In the first, one player so loaded another's arms with metal cans and percussion that he couldn't keep them all afloat. They sprang a leak, falling one-by-one until they all went in a final tragicomedic crash. Played against the gentle music, the scene was charged with existential angst that wouldn't have been out of place in a production of "Waiting for Godot." The other great moment came as the players pushed sand around on an amplified table during Wolfe's movement to create an eerie whoosh; at one point pianist Lisa Kaplan's whole body rolled on the table.

Still, less is more in this idiom and the falling instruments and magic-sand tricks grew wearisome after several repetitions. On the other hand, the players -- Kaplan, flutist Tim Munro, clarinetist Michael Maccaferri, violinist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos and percussionist Matthew Duvall -- attacked the music and theater with such vibrant virtuosity that it was easy to overlook the imperfections.

[7/4]

Nice...thanks!

.

[7/4]

REVIEW: Eighth Blackbird

April 11, 2008 13:48PM

Susan Isaacs Nisbett

Ann Arbor News Special Writer

It's not often that a classical music group plays two shows in a night. But

then, it's not often that you find a group like the willing, wild and

daring Eighth Blackbird, the contemporary music sextet that offered two

kinetically charged concerts at Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre Thursday

evening, under University Musical Society auspices.

I caught the first, 7 p.m. set of this double-your-fun evening,

which like its 9:30 p.m. twin consisted of two new works composed for

the group: Steve Reich's "Double Sextet" and a UMS co-commission by

Bang On A Can composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe,

"singing in the dead of night," with stage direction by choreographer

Susan Marshall and lighting by Matthew Land.

The choreography in the Reich was all aural, and all dazzling, as

the players - flutist Tim Munro, clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri,

violinist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos, percussionist Matthew

Duval and pianist Lisa Kaplan - assembled minimalist musical figures

and lines as they played live against a recording of themselves in a

complementary sextet. The interplay and the sonorities are incredibly

intricate and thrilling, and not just when Kaplan's piano and Duval's

vibraphone drive the show with blazing ostinati; the sextet's slow

middle section is haunting and hypnotic.

Wit and whimsy - plus virtuoso performance and a whole lot of moving

going on - are the calling cards of "singing in the dead of night," an

essay in serious fun in which accordions and harmonicas make cameo

appearances. Wolfe's section, which gives the work its title, is a

little long on Marshall's choreographed fun-with-pails-of-sand

interludes. But the soundscapes are captivating there and in Gordon's

"light of the dark" music and Lang's "broken wings" sections - elfin

music to start, drooping scales to continue, and puckish, pixilated pep

to finish.

[7/4]

Blackbird virtuosos need no visuals

Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic

Monday, April 14, 2008

In addition to playing their instruments like demons, members of the phenomenal new-music sextet, Eighth Blackbird, often incorporate stage movement into their performances. At its best, the group dispatches intricate and demanding scores - generally from memory - while supplementing the music with elegant visual counterpoint.

But there's movement and movement. Much of "Singing in the Dead of Night," a new 50-minute piece that the group introduced in Herbst Theatre on Saturday night, felt like first-rate music that had been cluttered up with all sorts of intrusive gimmickry and half-hearted stage crosses.

This is what happens, I suppose, when an innovative idea becomes a signature. Next stop: shtick.

"Singing in the Dead of Night" (the title, though not as far as I could tell any of the musical material, comes from the Lennon/McCartney classic "Blackbird") was commissioned from the three founding artistic directors of the New York new music festival Bang on a Can.

The composers - David Lang (who last week won a Pulitzer Prize for "The Little Match Girl Passion"), Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe - decided to incorporate Eighth Blackbird's stage moves into the new piece. So they divvied up the five individual movements of the work and enlisted choreographer Susan Marshall to add some theatrical business to the mix.

It's hard to know who was responsible for which elements of the result, which vacillated between inspired high jinks and tiresome performance-art cliches. Some of the stage maneuvers seemed crudely pasted onto the music ("Play over here - now go play over there"); others were more deeply integrated.

But none of it was as subtle or nuanced as some of the simple physical patterns that the group uses as visual counterpoint. And all of it drew attention to itself, relentlessly and often unrewardingly.

How many times, after all, can you watch a musician pour a bucket of sand onto a table and sweep it onto the floor before the effect wanes? If you guessed "once," you've overshot the mark.

The one movement that took full advantage of the stage was Gordon's "The Light of the Dark," a zestful, witty scherzo in which the performers took turns offering brisk melodic solos like the members of some kind of traveling band.

At the heart of the movement was a distinctive musical punctuation mark, a loud metallic clang from the percussion extended by a long sustained chord from the accordion. That striking musical gesture marked each quick shift in tone, and every time it raised an excited laugh; the one time it didn't arrive on cue created a brilliant comic gem.

Lang's three contributions sounded vivid and engaging - the jittery, offbeat dance of the Epilogue in particular sent listeners home pleasantly jazzed up - but they also had the least to do with any theatrical components. The effect of most of the music would have been the same, if not clearer, simply played straight.

That's especially true given the ferocious virtuosity of the group's members, flutist Tim Munro, clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri, violinist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos, percussionist Matthew Duvall and pianist Lisa Kaplan. There seems to be nothing they can't do, musically or otherwise.

The short first half of Saturday's program, sponsored by San Francisco Performances, was devoted to Steve Reich's "Double Sextet," written last year for the group. Like much of Reich's music, it involves a twinned ensemble - the members of Eighth Blackbird playing in conjunction with their pre-recorded selves - and it trades in the composer's familiar interlocking rhythms and cyclical harmonies.

A bad sound mix delivered the first of the piece's three movements at punishingly loud volume. But there was evidently a midcourse correction, because the remainder of the piece sounded terrific, mournful and tender in the central slow movement and densely athletic in the finale.

Edited April 20, 2008 by 7/4

[7/4]

solo Piano Phase

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[Bright Moments]

different trains - powerful stuff!

[GA Russell]

How does he pronounce his last name?

[clifford_thornton]

Rike

[GA Russell]

Thanks Cliff.

I saw him in Atlanta ca. 1986, and couldn't remember.

[Big Wheel]

[Hoppy T. Frog]

For those in the DC area, on November 11 Strathmore Music Center will have Bang On a Can doing an all-Reich program including the US premiere of 2X5.

[7/4]

Ezra Reich talks music and his pioneering dad, Steve Reich

April 2, 2011

One of the most enjoyable things I learned about Steve Reich, while writing this Arts and Books profile of the composer, hooked to his new work, "WTC 9/11," being performed Wednesday by the Kronos Quartet in Costa Mesa, was that the father of minimalism has a son who fronts a rock band in Los Angeles. And not your standard-issue strum-and-glum guitar rock. The music of the Ezra Reich Band is an unabashed throwback to 1980s synth-pop with big and marvelous hooks that say Berlin, I love you.

more

[medjuck]

I've seen Reich several times and each performance was magical. Never seen anyone else doing his work though I have some recordings.