Kronos Quartet presents a special programme celebrating Steve Reich's 90th birthday: Steve Reich at 90.
A journey through minimalist music and a tribute to a remarkable and extraordinarily productive lifelong collaboration that has left a lasting mark on the history of contemporary music.
The programme is devoted almost entirely to the work of Steve Reich, one of the world's most influential living composers and a leading figure of Minimalism.
The live programme brings together masterpieces written specifically for the American quartet alongside arrangements and works that have shaped the history of contemporary music. One of the highlights is Different Trains (1988), the Grammy Award-winning landmark in which Reich combines live strings with vocal samples and recordings of trains from the era to evoke his childhood journeys between New York and Los Angeles, placing them in dramatic contrast with the trains carrying Holocaust deportees in Europe.
The first part of the evening also features the experimental Pendulum Music (1968), for microphones, amplifiers, speakers and performers, Viderunt Omnes by the medieval master Pérotin, in an arrangement by Kronos, and Alabama by John Coltrane. Transcribed by Jacob Garchik, the latter is a deeply moving composition written by the saxophonist in the aftermath of the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, structured around the cadences of the oratory of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
The second half of the concert delves further into Reich's expressive research through three other major works from his catalogue, all closely connected to his collaboration with Kronos Quartet.
The programme opens with Triple Quartet (1999), a composition structured in three movements—Fast, Slow, Fast—in which the live quartet interacts harmonically and rhythmically with a pre-recorded performance of two additional string quartets.
This is followed by a selection from The Cave (1993), the multimedia work created with Beryl Korot, inspired by the Cave of Hebron and built around the melodic contours of the speech of those interviewed.
The concert also features WTC 9/11 (2010), the third work Reich composed for the quartet. Structured in three movements and driven by a single emergency telephone signal, the piece reworks archival recordings of air traffic controllers and firefighters from 11 September 2001, before incorporating, in its final movement, the voices and chants of women volunteers involved in the Jewish ritual of Shmira, the vigil traditionally held over the deceased. The result is a work of intense and concise dramatic power.