February 12, 2016

by David Hurwitz

Steve Reich’s music for (mostly) mallet percussion will either hold you enthralled or knock you unconscious, but there’s no in-between. One thing is certain: the musical idiom perfectly suits the instrumentation. Even Music for Pieces of Wood, which can sound like the noise your refrigerator makes when the ice maker is on the fritz, offers a fascinatingly musical study in rhythm and–yes–harmony, amazingly produced with only a few fixed pitches. At least, it does that in these superb performances.

This is extremely challenging music to produce effectively. It has to be played with machine-like precision, but at the same time it ought not to sound machine-like. In these performances there is a buoyancy to the perpetually pulsating rhythms in the Mallet Quartet and (above all) the lengthy Sextet that somehow conveys that joy in movement that seems to be what this music is all about–to the extent it’s about anything at all. Those gently but inexorably shifting rhythmic and harmonic patterns spring vividly to life.

That said, I wouldn’t recommend playing through the disc at a sitting, unless of course you’re planning on spending a full hour in a trance or some other meditative state. One thing is certain: the sonics are just perfect–amazingly lifelike, placing the ensemble in an ideal acoustic so that the actual timbres never become fatiguing. We haven’t heard much from Reich lately, on disc at least. Here’s a potent reminder of what an original musical force he was, and still is.

Read the original article here.

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