Reich City

The music of Steve Reich has been heard in various venues, including electronic music dance clubs, but the full symphony orchestra treatment has been rare. That is changing, however, with the tenure of Kristjan Järvi as chief conductor of the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the result in that musically conservative, German city is this major-label double album of Reich's music, in many respects a first. Järvi's enthusiasm for the project is palpable here, most obviously in the live performance of the early Reich standard Clapping Music, which he and the composer perform together to the approval of the crowd.

The beauty of Steve Reich's minimalist compositions can be found not in their repetition but in their evolution. Listening to the Kronos Quartet perform Different Trains, the listener quickly gets over the camp value of the conductor samples to discover an unfolding theme that harks back not only to bustling industrialism but also to the horror of the Nazi concentration-camp trains. Reich is a master of such subtle changes in sonics, and his impeccable timing turns simple phrases into musical tapestries. On Reich Remixed, some of dance music's more innovative artists pay homage to the composer in the way they know best: by sampling his works and remixing them into their own.

Steve Reich - Drumming (2018) {2CD first-time CD release Superior Viaduct SV097 rec 1971}
XLD rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 486 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 193 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 23 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1971, 2018 Steve Reich / Superior Viaduct | SV097
Classical / Contemporary Classical / Minimalism / Experimental / Avant-Garde / Percussion

This first-time vinyl reissue and first-time CD release has been carefully remastered from the original master tapes. Recorded live at Town Hall, New York City, 16 December 1971. Steve Reich's Drumming is regarded as one of the most important musical works of the last century. Distilled through his studies of African percussion in Ghana during 1970 and Balinese gamelan music, Reich revolutionized our understanding of polyrhythms, sculpting a new sonic territory to illuminate the radical potential of Minimalism.