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."

The new album featuring the first recordings of Steve Reich's Double Sextet and 2x5 is due out on Nonesuch in just under three weeks. "Beautifully poised throughout," says the BBC, "Double Sextet stands as arguably one of Reich’s finest works." Sequenza 21 calls the album "an intergenerational summit—minimalist elder statesman meets post-minimal/totalist ace performers—that, in terms of importance, is more or less the Downtown version of Duke Ellington and John Coltrane."

Nonesuch releases an album with two Steve Reich compositions—Double Sextet and 2x5—on September 14, 2010. The Pulitzer Prize–winning piece Double Sextet, performed here by eighth blackbird, has been cited "among the finest pieces of our time" by the Philadelphia Inquirer. Bang on a Can perform 2x5, which premiered at the Manchester International Festival on a double bill with Kraftwerk and expands Reich's musical palate with rock instrumentation.

Steve Reich will be a special guest of the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York, tonight, for a screening of the documentary Steve Reich, Phase to Face, and the Opening Night of the center's Sounds of Summer series of music documentaries. Reich will be interviewed by WNYC's John Schaefer, who chaired the jury that chose Reich's Double Sextet for the Pulitzer Prize. Nonesuch will release a recording of that piece, paired with 2x5, later this year.

When Steve Reich turned 70 in 2006, the world's major concert halls celebrated with retrospectives of the composer's work. Included among them was the Barbican in London, which has just announced plans to celebrate Reich's 75th birthday next year with Reverberations: The Influence of Steve Reich, pairing four London premieres of new Reich compositions with music written by composers who have followed in his footsteps.

Steve Reich joined So Percussion on stage in a performance of his 1972 work Clapping Music—"still one of his most audacious and breathtaking creations," says the San Francisco Chronicle—for a "marvelous" all-Reich program at Stanford. Featured were some of Reich's "groundbreaking percussion works" that sounded "as magical and arresting as ever," says the Chronicle, and the US premiere of Reich's Mallet Quartet. At the hands of the performers, said the Mercury News, it sounded "irresistible."

Steve Reich will join So Percussion in a performance of Clapping Music for an all-Reich program at Stanford University this Saturday. The concert, featuring the US premiere of Reich's latest piece, Mallet Quartet, is the culmination of a number of related events at Stanford this week, including a public conversation with Reich and Beryl Korot. The San Jose Mercury News calls it all "a welcome and rare opportunity for immersion in Reich's rhythmical realm."

Q2, the new 24/7 music stream from New York public radio's WQXR dedicated to contemporary classical music, kicks off its first full festival, Maximum Reich: A Celebration of Steve Reich, today. This weeklong immersion into Reich's work will include a presentation of his recorded works, explorations of the influences both on and of Reich, recent videos and exclusive downloads, and interviews and music recordings from the archives of WNYC, the new owner of WQXR.

Steve Reich's Drumming, once described by the New York Times as a piece that "inhabits our bones and viscera," makes novelist Kim Echlin's playlist in the Times blog Paper Cuts. "It is gorgeous process music," she writes, "lasts about an hour ... and you feel surprised, as if suddenly waking from a brief dream, when it is over." So Percussion performs the piece in an all-Reich program at Stanford in January, at which the composer joins on his Clapping Music.

Steve Reich led a concert of his works at London's Royal Festival Hall last weekend. The Guardian and The Times both give it four stars, the latter calling it "spellbinding." "Three thousand people sat gripped on Saturday night by 11 musical chords elongated over 57 minutes," says The Times. "Nearly half a century has passed since Steve Reich’s first concerts, but the standing ovation after Music for 18 Musicians suggested that his brand of minimalism hasn’t lost its hypnotic allure."

Steve Reich was born in New York, raised there and California, and has spent much of his life in the City. He has also been spending time in Vermont for more than three decades. Vermont Public Radio spoke with the composer about his career and how the quiet of Vermont has influenced his writing. He was in Massachusetts this weekend for MASS MoCA's Bang on a Can Festival, which culminated in a performance of Music for 18 Musicians. Says the Boston Globe: "Reich’s towering 1976 epic rang out like a renewed statement of purpose: a postmodern hoedown of joyfully interlocking parts."