Steve Reich's WTC 9/11 recently received its world premiere in a performance by Kronos Quartet, which will give the West Coast premiere this week in Irvine, California. The Los Angeles Times spoke with the composer about this "signature Reich piece" and with Kronos, "the pied pipers of innovative music," about the collaboration. Kronos will give the NY premiere later this month in an all-Reich program at Carnegie Hall. Kronos and other performers on the concert talk about performing Reich's music in new short videos you can watch here.
Steve Reich's latest piece, WTC 9/11, received its world premiere on March 19 in a performance by Kronos Quartet at Duke University. Kronos performed the piece at the University of Arizona's Centennial Hall in Tucson last night and will give WTC 9/11 its West Coast premiere this Wednesday at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Irvine, California, on a program also featuring Laurie Anderson's Flow and works by Bryce Dessner, Nicole Lizée, Missy Mazzoli, and Aleksandra Vrebalov.
The Los Angeles Times spoke with Steve Reich about this week's West Coast premiere of WTC 9/11 and the terrifying and very personal events surrounding the attacks on the World Trade Center that inspired the piece. In the article, writer Kevin Berger describes Kronos as "the pied pipers of innovative music" and the new work as "a signature Reich piece that blends pulsating strings with recorded voices from people at Ground Zero."
The article surveys Reich's career and his impact on today's musical landscape, as many performers and concert hall around the world are doing for the composer's 75th birthday this year.
"Like no American composer before or after him, Reich reanimated recorded voices into scintillating tones and pitches," says Berger. "Since the early '70s, Reich's musical influence has been undeniable. Those minimalist repetitions, subtle counterpoints and mesmerizing harmonies that course through the music of artists from [John] Adams to Pat Metheny, Brian Eno to Radiohead, spring from Reich's pioneering works."
Kronos Quartet, too, has had a rich working relationship with Reich, whose two previous quartets, Different Trains and Triple Quartet, were written for Kronos as well. The group's violinist and artistic director David Harrington tells Berger what it was like to perform the new piece for the first time.
"It was an astonishing experience," Harrington tells the Times. "Not only are you taken back to those early moments of Sept. 11, you're taken forward to the way people are dealing with that event. I think Steve accomplishes something very rare. And that is a transformation of that collective experience."
There's much more in the article, which you can read in full at latimes.com.
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Kronos will give the New York premiere of WTC 9/11 in an all-Reich concert at Carnegie Hall on April 30. Also performing are Bang on a Can All-Stars, eighth blackbird, and So Percussion. The program, titled Music of Steve Reich, will also include the New York premieres of Mallet Quartet and 2x5, along with a performance of Reich's Pulitzer Prize-winning piece, Double Sextet. Reich spoke with the Carnegie Hall blog about writing that last piece for eighth blackbird and its subsequent first-recording for Nonesuch. You can read what he has to say at blog.carnegiehall.org.
Members of Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, and So Percussion spoke with Reich's publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, about performing Reich's music, in advance of the Carnegie Hall concert. You can watch those videos below.
Kronos Quartet's David Harrington:
eighth blackbird's Matt Albert:
So Percussion, Part 1 of 2:
So Percussion, Part 2 of 2:
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