By Paul Bodine
Special to the Register
original link (plus photo slideshow)

Reich's pulsing pleasures sung by blackbird

Review: The innovative contemporary ensemble offers the local premiere of a new work by the celebrated minimalist.

For classical music critics, premieres can be heady stuff. In an art form routinely disparaged for repeatedly programming the same museum collection of works, the unveiling of a new work – even as a "West Coast" premiere rather than the "world" variety – offers a chance to celebrate a living, growing art. And Tuesday night's performance by the chamber sextet eighth blackbird at Samueli Theater was no garden-variety premiere. Both pieces on the program, Steve Reich's Double Sextet, a co-commission of the Orange County Performing Artscenter, and the three-composer collaboration "singing in the dead of night," could hardly have been newer. Reich's work was given its world premiere in Richmond, Va., three weeks ago and is due in Carnegie Hall on Thursday night.

Reich, now 71, has been labeled as a "minimalist" for so long that even now that he's called "America's greatest living composer" it's hard for some to acknowledge how significant his early breakthroughs with phased, contrapuntal compositions really were or how creatively he has continued to reinvent his style. Over four decades he has written effectively for everything from violin, piano, string quartet, and human voice to glockenspiel, electric guitar, and mallet, while setting to music sources as varied as William Carlos Williams, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Quran, and slain journalist Daniel Pearl.

His Double Sextet is vintage Reich: a three-movement machine of pulsing, intensifying rhythms in which the blackbird's flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and vibraphone played against (that is, sometimes slightly out of sync with) a recording of themselves playing the same piece. Thus, while Reich's instrumentation was traditional, the effect was anything but. A doubled, amplified sextet can generate a big wall of sound, especially when the piano and vibraphone are riveted together in the driving groove Reich gives them.

Reich's blended passages for the clarinet, flute, violin, and cello – creating the distinctive drone of some weirdly other-worldly fifth instrument – demonstrated how much more there is to Reich's craft than just amplified "repetition." No one who's heard Reich's previous works would be shocked by the rhetoric of Double Sextet, but its remorseless ascent in the closing bars – the bottom drops abruptly out, leaving the flute and clarinet playing exultantly on as if bursting free of gravity's grip – is no less impressive.
The composers of the program's other premiere, "singing in the dead of night," David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe, formed the organization Bang on a Can in the early 1980s to enable young, genre-defying composers to hear their works performed. Steve Reich himself made an appearance during Bang on a Can's daylong inaugural marathon concert in Soho on Mother's Day 1987, and their collaborations continue to this day.

Ironically, despite their genre-busting, Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe have found themselves pigeonholed anyway, and the rock, jazz, and world-music influences of their "post-Minimalism" were all evident in the five-part "singing in the dead of night," commissioned by eighth blackbird. Reich's influence could also be heard, but not his genius. From its busily ineffectual opening bars, Lang's prologue, "these broken wings" (variations of which formed the piece's second episode and its epilogue) revealed few interesting musical ideas – a ragged, repetitive minimalism without Reich's rigor, creativity, or architectural vision. Gordon's Episode 1 offered both greater variety and sophistication and a welcome sense of humor, as cellist Nicholas Photino's monotonously rock-flavored sawing made him the target of the other blackbirds' efforts to steal his thunder.

Though "singing in the dead of night" needed these choreographed (by Susan Marshall) bits to hold the audience's interest, they too grew old. At strategic moments various blackbirds would drop metal pots and objects to the stage floor or ritualistically spread sand onto a mic-ed table, creating wavelike sounds, but also the distinct sense that somewhere the difference between good ideas and half-baked, self-indulgent ones got lost.

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