Composer Steve Reich's music has recently been celebrated with an all-Reich program at the BBC Proms in London, and more praise from the UK arrived this week, with the announcement that Reich's album Double Sextet / 2x5 is on the shortlist for this year's Gramophone Classical Music Awards in the Contemporary category. In a review of last week's Proms, the Observer reported that Reich "received a rock star's welcome at a late-night concert held to honour his 75th birthday later this year," and according to the Guardian, "Steve Reich gets cooler every year, just as his music gets more relevant."
Composer Steve Reich's music has recently been celebrated with an all-Reich program at the BBC Proms in London, and more praise from the UK arrived this week, with the announcement that Reich's album Double Sextet / 2x5 is on the shortlist for this year's Gramophone Classical Music Awards in the Contemporary category.
In a review of last week's Proms at Royal Albert Hall, the Observer's Stephen Pritchard reported that Reich "received a rock star's welcome at a late-night concert held to honour his 75th birthday later this year," during which the composer performed, along with Rainer Römer, his infamous Clapping Music, a composition that Pritchard calls a "perfect introduction to the principles of all of Reich's work: finding patterns, repeating them, shifting them on."
This principle was echoed in the performance of his legendary piece, Music for 18 Musicians, in which "Reich's quiet genius was most gloriously evident ... it feels like a piece of liturgy, a reverence falling over the whole process as the music continues on its logical cycle towards completion. Everything is entirely tonal, the harmony stable, the sonority rich and satisfying. The whole experience felt oddly religious and deeply cleansing." In reviewing the performance, the Financial Times remarked on the same piece, "This is one of Reich’s seminal pieces and the hypnotic rhythms of its amplified women’s voices, pianos and tuned percussion created a seductive aura of sound." According to Guy Dammann in the Guardian, "Steve Reich gets cooler every year, just as his music gets more relevant."
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