Tonight, in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, Steve Reich's Double Sextet will be given its New York premiere by the Grammy-winning ensemble eighth blackbird. The group performed the world premiere late last month at the University of Richmond, where the ensemble is in residence and which co-commissioned the work along with Carnegie Hall and the Orange County Performing Arts Center; earlier this week, eighth blackbird played Double Sextet at the Samueli Theater in Orange County, California.
Of the premiere performance in Richmond, the Washington Post's Anne Midgette wrote that "the players, live and recorded, create layer upon layer of sound, a rich mille-feuille of music, while pinwheeling light-images create visual parallels on the wall behind them." She had this to say about the new piece:
Double Sextet is obviously in the tradition of his other live/taped pieces, such as New York Counterpoint. But in this piece, his rhythmic patterns became a background against which he held up chords as if examining them under the light, replacing his characteristic spareness with something verging on melodic richness ...
To read the review, visit washingtonpost.com.
Following this past Tuesday's performance at the Samueli Theater in Costa Mesa, the Orange County Register calls the new work "vintage Reich," with reviewer Paul Bodine writing:
Reich, now 71, has been labeled as a "minimalist" for so long that even now that he's called "America's greatest living composer" it's hard for some to acknowledge how significant his early breakthroughs with phased, contrapuntal compositions really were or how creatively he has continued to reinvent his style.
Bodine says of Double Sextet that "while Reich's instrumentation was traditional, the effect was anything but." To read the review, visit ocregister.com.
Tonight's concert in Zankel Hall, which begins at 7:30 PM, will be preceded, at 6:30, by a discussion with the composer, members of the ensemble, and Ara Guzelimian, Provost and Dean of The Juilliard School; it is open to concert ticketholders.
Also on the concert program is the New York premiere of singing in the dead of night by the founding members of Bang on a Can---David Lang (a recent Pulitzer Prize winner), Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolf---with stage direction by Susan Marshall.
For more information and to read the program notes by the composers, visit carnegiehall.org.
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