Big round birthdays call for celebration, sure. But they’re also a fine time to check in on an artist’s career.
The American Minimalist composer Steve Reich turned 90 this month. And it’s clear that New York, his hometown, still digs him. Last week, the Park Avenue Armory gave his pulsing and dreamily vivacious 1970s work “Music for 18 Musicians” an immersive treatment; on Thursday evening, Carnegie Hall presented a birthday concert that included the United States premiere of his latest piece, “In All Your Ways.” Both shows sold out.
“In All Your Ways” proves that Reich remains in fine creative health. The syllables of its title, taken from Proverbs, allow for a great deal of elite Reichian patterning: Successions of four-note motifs appear liberally throughout the work. That’s the case in this composer’s generally hyperactive parts for marimbas and vibraphones, though it is even easier to discern in his writing for flutes, clarinets and violins.
Reich continually changes note lengths and harmonic underpinnings, too, so the cavalcade of riffing never comes across as tired. Thanks to the major, minor and modal approaches to the key signatures he identifies in the score — “three sharps, two flats, five flats and all naturals” — those four-note phrases frequently team up to create longer melodic lines of real rapture. (The performance included members of Bang on a Can All-Stars and Ensemble Signal.)
Last Friday, I was less enamored of “Music for 18” — all three times I heard the piece in this durational presentation called “Staged Variations.” Three different groups presented the hourlong work in succession, under mood lighting and with occasional choreography: the Steve Reich Ensemble, the Manhattan School of Music group Tactus and Alarm Will Sound. (A brief vocal and violin interlude from Caroline Shaw helped cover a tech change after the first take.)
The first group established itself as the legatee of Reich’s old ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians. Bob Becker and Russell Hartenberger were both still doubling on marimba and xylophone, but Reich is no longer one of the pianists; younger professionals joined the veterans. Theirs was the tightest performance on Friday, perhaps because of experience.
Or because these artists were largely stationary, merely playing the music. By contrast, Tactus and Alarm Will Sound ranged through the expanses of the Armory’s vast Drill Hall. Sometimes that allowed for intimacy, as when the Tactus cellist Clara Cho, instrument strapped to her body, executed subtle drones while striding past audience members seated on risers around the circular stage. And during the piece’s most dramatic pivot — in which one maraca player starts driving the work — the Tactus member Jonathan Collazo dashed around the stage while keeping the beat going. This was galvanizing, and aerobically impressive.
But just as often, the constant gamboling extracted costs from the work’s finely plotted equilibrium. During the Alarm Will Sound performance — less kinetic than Tactus, though still involving movement — I often felt that blooming clarinet pulses were lagging a touch behind the mallet-percussion patterns. (This is partly an effect of the space, though some groups, including Ensemble Intercontemporain, have surmounted the challenge, usually while seated.) I sensed a similar demotion of “Music for 18” during a “spatial” remix presented at the Shed’s Sonic Sphere in 2023.
“Music for 18” is so well loved that many venues would like to find a way to program it. Yet the work’s fame may now be slightly working against it. A “regular” performance of this tonally luscious, justly popular music is enough.
That’s a pretty good problem for a composer to have in his 10th decade, as he remains productive: something demonstrated at Carnegie, where the program was notable for mostly offering 21st-century works. The exception was the concert-opening performance of “Electric Counterpoint” (1987) offered by Bryce Dessner, who played his electric guitar with a warmly blooming tone that I found more to my taste than the original recording by Pat Metheny, for whom it was commissioned.
After that came another United States premiere: “Two Pianos,” from 2020. Played with verve by Lisa Kaplan and Nico Muhly, its punchier statements hinted at some of the writing for two pianos in “In All Your Ways.” Composed during the pandemic, a few stray, crunchy bass-register harmonies during “Two Pianos” appeared to allude to states of tension — but as in much of Reich’s music, a singing quality emerged over the course of the four-minute score.
After that, the night doubled as a Brad Lubman conducting clinic, with this new-music specialist leading vibrant, rhythmically authoritative takes on Reich’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Double Sextet” (2007), “Jacob’s Ladder” (2023) and “In All Your Ways.”
Some artists, like the vocalist Charlotte Mundy, were pulling double duty at the Armory shows and the birthday concert. Yet everyone sounded better at Carnegie, where Reich himself was visible in his preferred spot at the mixing board (supervising the tasteful amplification). When he appeared onstage at the end, he received a loud and sustained ovation. He shook his cane in the air; it seemed like an avowal that he was not yet finished.
So here’s to the next round anniversary, and the next premiere.
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