There is just one week to go before the release of Steve Reich's Double Sextet and 2x5. Until then, you can listen to the album streaming in its entirety as an NPR First Listen. "Reich's innovations across the decades seem to have been distilled and polished to a sheen not heard in his music before now," says NPR of Double Sextet. "[W]hat makes every new Reich recording an opportunity to uncover new mysteries is his continued willingness, as with the rock idiom of 2x5, to shift gears and change direction. He makes it easy to want to follow him on a wild, joyful ride."
There is just one week to go before the September 14 release of the new album featuring Steve Reich's Double Sextet and 2x5. Until then, you can listen to the album streaming in its entirety as an NPR First Listen on npr.org. Next Tuesday's release date is a full one, as NPR notes, and the Reich album is the only contemporary classical album among those "handpicked" by NPR music as "favorites" for the coming week's First Listens that includes albums from Robert Plant and Of Montreal. Once you've heard it, there's still time pre-order Double Sextet / 2x5 in the Nonesuch Store and receive the complete album as audiophile-quality, 320 kbps MP3s on release day at no additional cost.
In previewing the NPR First Listen, Alex Ambrose, a producer for WQXR's contemporary music stream, Q2, writes of Double Sextet that "Reich's innovations across the decades seem to have been distilled and polished to a sheen not heard in his music before now." The piece, for which the composer won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, is performed on the album by eighth blackbird with "such confidence that the listener can slip easily into the dynamic flow Reich surely envisions."
Paired with Double Sextet on Reich's forthcoming Nonesuch release is one of his newest works, 2x5, performed by Bang on a Can. With its "rock" instrumentation, the piece reminds listeners that the composer continues to innovate. "Just when a nice bow might be tied around Reich's sound," says Ambrose, "along comes 2x5 to knock that notion off track."
It's another example of the composer's ever-expanding musical vocabulary. As Ambrose says, "what makes every new Reich recording an opportunity to uncover new mysteries is his continued willingness, as with the rock idiom of 2x5, to shift gears and change direction. He makes it easy to want to follow him on a wild, joyful ride."
Read more and listen to the complete album at npr.org, where you can also download a free track from the 1994 Nonesuch recording of Reich's Tehillim. The complete album is available in the Nonesuch Store.
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