Colin Currie: My Steve Reich Top Five
In an exclusive playlist, Scottish percussionist Colin Currie shares his favourite recordings by the pioneering American composer Steve Reich, including an uplifting performance of 'Tehillim' which features the composer himself.
Read more…Music for 18 Musicians – Ensemble Signal
For sheer overarching beauty of sonority and structure, this work from the current mid-point of Reich’s lifetime reflects much of his endeavour. The instrumental line-up of percussion group, massed pianos, strings and winds in pairs, and the female voices make for a shining, warm and astoundingly colourful ensemble. The music breathes naturally with the musicians always contributing on a micro-level to how long the phrases/gestures will be. A good rendition, like that of Ensemble Signal, shows this clearly - a living, breathing organism of 18 worker-bee performers, all at the same blissful hive.
Different Trains (1990, Nonesuch)
This work shows a particular strand of profundity, keenly projected by this composer. A haunting and personal meditation on the fate of circumstance as well as a unique artistic sync-up between recorded interviews and highly affecting musical ideas, the work coheres into a monumental, and occasionally grief-stricken whole. The original performers give a subtle and graceful version here, ratcheting up the sonic tension when needed and matching their musical lines to the spoken words with effortless conviction.
Tehillim – Steve Reich and Musicians (1982)
This work, arguably Reich’s most melodic music to date, has an astounding grandeur. The Psalm settings use brilliantly simple and extremely alluring melodic lines which are then treated to dense canonic development over delicately intense harmonic padding. The percussion ensemble is now equipped with tambourines without jingles, and propelled further forward with hand-clapping, and eventually a shaker which endures for the most extraordinary and athletic of durations. The final ‘Hallelujah’ chorus is one of the most uplifting in the entire repertory of classical music, in this writer’s opinion.
Drumming – Colin Currie Group
Perhaps the Steve Reich work that I feel closest to, and the one that transfixes me the most. An astounding work of mathematical perfection, it is also a ritual of musical magnificence and brazen originality. The subtle improvisatory elements that he uses never obscure the taught and hypnotic sense of structure, and in the version that my ensemble has created, extreme highs of great drama can contrast strongly with moments of vulnerable softness and reflection. A force-of-nature piece that always maintains a deeply arresting trajectory, and one of both extraordinary clarity and complexity. Colin Currie Group worked very closely with Steve on our version of this music, taking it on a new ‘expressionist’ (Steve Reich) direction, and focussing on the chamber-music subtleties possible over the course of the work.
Pulse – International Contemporary Ensemble
A personal favourite, perhaps due to its highly alluring freshness and sense of looking both backwards and forwards in the composer’s style. Using the key chords of ‘Music for 18 Musicians’ as focal points, the work at once recollects that world, yet looks ahead to a newly developing one of heightened harmonic keenness and a pushing at the limits of tonality. The deeply delicious bass lines are the domain of a bass guitar, locked into a straight quaver pulse that yet explores widely the limits of its assignation. Winds and strings in canon will be familiar by now to listeners, but the newly and gently clashing qualities of these breezy lines point forward one feels. This version balances beautifully and the streamlined focus of the group set the music affectionately in the gentle glow it natural inhabits.