Steve Reich: Daniel Variations
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Composer: Steve ReichConductor: Grant Gershon
Conductor: Alan Pierson
Orchestra: London Sinfonietta
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2008-04-08
Music Label: Nonesuch
Free Music Notes for Steve Reich: Daniel Variations
Free Music Review: Steve Reich's Late Style
Hit: 4 Stars
Since his Triple Quartet of 1999, Steve Reich has been engaged in a project of loosening up the compositional processes and contrapuntal grids that framed his earlier work. As early as Octet (1979) and Sextet (1984), Reich was situating structural and harmonic changes within unbroken melodic and rhythmic material. The Counterpoint pieces (1982, 1985, 1987) make this concern with continuously resounding texture and dense harmonic space more explicit.
Daniel Variations (2006) delivers probably the most searing melodic material of Reich's career. While the strings are given the task of doubling the voices in the first and third movements of the piece, Reich makes them the dynamic--sometimes mournful sometimes nostalgic--emotive center of the second and fourth movements.
In recent years, Reich has forgone the sprite, canonic interlocking rhythmic patterns of the 70s and 80s in favor of denser rhythmic accompaniment, extended chords struck out in what Alex Ross has called "telegraphic patterns." Throughout the piece, at two or four pianists or vibraphonists (among ten percussion players total) hammer out these structural patterns. Defying the regularity of the constant pulse that underpinned Reich's classic Music for 18 Musicians (1976), these 'telegraphic' patterns convey a sense of perpetual, unyielding forward energy. While the harmonies assigned to these rhythmic patterns creates a range of emotional import, their kinetic energy is felt throughout the entirety of the piece.
The remaining percussionists play (usually brightly colored) accentuations often synchronized with certain syllables sung by the vocalists. These brilliant, thickly resonant chords both provide the bass information of the chords while drawing out consonances in the middle and high ranges and especially the voices.
This most recent recording of Reich's music serves to show just how much his music has evolved since the diatonic harmony and steady pulse he used during the 1970s. Reich has synthesized that harmonic language with the more chromatic language he developed throughout the 1980s. The result, as we hear in Daniel Variations, is a highly nuanced range of expressive potential. Furthermore, the formal and structural means by which Reich allows this expressive quality to flourish demonstrate clearly the fruits of an intelligent, self-critically modernist composer who continues to reinvigorate and renew his musical vocabulary.
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