Kronos Quartet gave the West Coast premiere of Steve Reich's latest piece, WTC 9/11, at Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Irvine, California, last night on a program that also featured Laurie Anderson's Flow and works by Bryce Dessner, Nicole Lizée, Missy Mazzoli, and Aleksandra Vrebalov.

What was "indisputable news," writes Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed in his review of the concert, "is that a key and leading American Minimalist who turns 75 this year is also still, potently, kicking ..."

Reich wrote WTC 9/11 for Kronos (his third quartet for the group) in response to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and, as noted earlier this week in the Nonesuch Journal, spoke with the Los Angeles Times prior to the West Coast premiere about the very personal events that inspired the piece.

Swed goes on to say of last night's performance: "The Kronos Quartet performing live, and in its prerecorded selves, mimics speech as music and, doing so, turns it into commanding music. Reich’s amplification is in your face. His rhythmic complexity, the shifting beats and complex contrapuntal interlacing, creates tension. He makes you think and at the same time doesn’t give you the space in which to think."

Writing of the Aleksandra Vrebalov piece on the program, … hold me, neighbor, in this storm …, Swed concludes: "It is a gripping piece and was, as was every work all evening, given a gripping performance."

Read the concert review at latimes.com.

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It made for "an invariably strong program" and "a terrific concert," says the Orange County Register's Timothy Mangan.

"WTC 9/11 is compelling and dramatic, gritty, too, without trying too hard," Mangan writes. "The piece would be musically interesting even if its subject wasn't so fraught."

Mangan goes on to laud the performers: "The Kronos gave it a stunning performance, which was par for the night. These musicians always play amplified and that allows them not to press, to retain poise even in the most demanding music. That poise is also undeniably cool, in the slang sense of the word, and adds to the group's attraction."

Read the complete review at ocregister.com.

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Kronos performs WTC 9/11 at the Clarice Smith Center in College Park, Maryland, this Sunday and will give the New York premiere in an all-Reich concert at Carnegie Hall on April 30. For more information on this and other upcoming performances, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.