Two very positive reviews of our two back-to-back University Musical Society performances in Ann Arbor MI on Thursday night have appeared.
Mark Stryker writes in the Detroit Free Press (that city’s daily newspaper):
It’s been a thrill for metro Detroiters to watch Eighth Blackbird grow into a leading new music ensemble, because we’ve known about the group’s charisma and skill longer than most …
“Double Sextet” features Reich’s trademark gleaming surfaces and phase-shifting rhythms, but there is also the sneaky melodic lushness that has crept into his music in recent decades. Piano and vibes (and their taped counterparts) acted a rhythm section, creating a web of head-bobbing, asymmetric rhythms. Violin, flute, clarinet and cello laid slowly revolving melodies on top, creating a glint so bright you almost needed sunglasses.
In the slow movement, piano and vibes merged into a pool of open harmony and the melody took on a beautiful yearning quality that reminded me of a meditative John Coltrane ballad …
[T]he players … attacked the music and theater with such vibrant virtuosity that it was easy to overlook the imperfections.
Susan Isaac Nisbett writes in the Ann Arbor News:
It’s not often that a classical music group plays two shows in a night. But then, it’s not often that you find a group like the willing, wild and daring Eighth Blackbird, the contemporary music sextet that offered two kinetically charged concerts at Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre …
The choreography in the Reich was all aural, and all dazzling, as the players … assembled minimalist musical figures and lines as they played live against a recording of themselves in a complementary sextet. The interplay and the sonorities are incredibly intricate and thrilling, and not just when Kaplan’s piano and Duval’s vibraphone drive the show with blazing ostinati; the sextet’s slow middle section is haunting and hypnotic …
Wit and whimsy - plus virtuoso performance and a whole lot of moving going on - are the calling cards of “singing in the dead of night,” an essay in serious fun in which accordions and harmonicas make cameo appearances.
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