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Stories   >   Steve Reich - String Quartets by Kronos are irreplaceable, but Mivos creates compelling complementary readings / Sequenza21/

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Steve Reich - String Quartets by Kronos are irreplaceable, but Mivos creates compelling complementary readings / Sequenza21/

Posted: February 13, 2023

Between 1988 and 2010, Steve Reich composed three string quartets – Different Trains, Triple Quartet and WTC 9/11. Deutsche Grammophon now presents this trilogy of works for the first time on one album, in definitive new recordings from the Mivos Quartet. Hailed by The Chicago Reader as “one of America’s most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles”, the Mivos players developed their interpretations of the three quartets – inspired by the music of speech, echoes of Bartók and the events of a day transformed by terror – in close collaboration with the composer. Steve Reich: The String Quartets, featuring notes by veteran radio host and music writer John Schaefer, is set for release digitally, on CD and on vinyl (2 LPs) today. “9/11/01”, the first movement of WTC 9/11, was issued as a single on Friday 18 November.

Dedicated to performing music by contemporary composers, Mivos first programmed Reich’s three quartets in one concert at the Jewish Museum in New York City in February 2016 and have played the works often since then. It was Reich himself who invited the ensemble to take on the challenge of recording all three for a single album. The composer, who recently marked his 86th birthday, supported the project from inception to completion, answering the group’s questions about fine musical details, offering advice on matters of style and endorsing the finished album.

Described by The New Yorker as “the most original musical thinker of our time”, Steve Reich made his name in the 1960s and 1970s with works marked by their use of shifting rhythmic patterns and phases. His compositional process seemed less than conducive to writing for four individual instrumentalists, but the change came in 1988, when he experimented with treating the string quartet as a single instrument.

Reich’s music had embraced speech melody during the 1980s, opening to the expressive rise and fall of spoken languages. At the end of the decade, this led to Different Trains, his first string quartet, in which he combined live performance with pre-recorded speech and additional layers of pre-recorded music to recall the cross-country train journeys he made from New York to California in the early 1940s after his parents divorced. The piece also considers the very different train rides taken at the same time by other Jewish children, in Europe, to Nazi death or concentration camps.

 

Sequenza21/ - Christian Carey writes…..Steve Reich wrote his three string quartets for the Kronos Quartet, who have premiered, recorded (for Nonesuch), and continued to champion them. With Kronos still active, why does another quartet record these pieces? Mivos Quartet makes a strong case that there is room for other interpretations of Reich’s string quartets.

I remember well being at the Carnegie Hall premiere of Steve Reich’s piece for string quartet and multimedia WTC 9/11, performed by Kronos Quartet. Its incorporation of sound recordings, a dead phone line, air traffic controllers, and those trying to escape the building, was harrowing. Like his first quartet, Different Trains, Reich creates instrumental motives out of spoken word passages, imitating their contour and imparting pitch. The final movement, in which Jewish prayers are said over remains from the site, is extraordinarily moving. By the end of the work, many in the audience were visibly shaken by its visceral impact. Kronos has since recorded WTC 9/11, in a gritty rendition reminiscent of the energy of the live performance.

Mivos plays with equal poignancy, but also with  a laser beam clarity that brings an entirely different palette of textures to bear. The recorded voices too have been remastered to emphasize incisiveness of utterance. Even with the constraints of overdubbing and vocal samples, there is freshness to Mivos’s approach to phrasing, taut and lithe.

Triple Quartet features three quartets overdubbed throughout the piece (no vocal samples). Mivos play up the polyrhythms that festoon the work. Just when you think the groove is interlocked for good, Reich throws another intricate rhythmic relationship into the mix. Lest things become too motoric, glissandos and solo turns enliven the texture. Triple Quartet doesn’t have the narrative arc that defines the other pieces here, but it is a fine piece of abstract music

Different Trains is an iconic work. At the beginning of the Second World War, Reich was shuttled back and forth on trains between separated parents. The “different trains” are those destined for the death camps in Poland. Its first movement features voices from Reich’s train rides, a porter, and governess, and clangorous train sounds. As in WTC 9/11,  Reich creates melodic phrases that mimic the contours of the sampled speeches. The second movement is terrifying, with speakers who are survivors of the Holocaust describing their trips on trains to the death camps. Air raid sirens are added to the train sounds, which move on a different polyrhythmic pathway. The final movement describes the end of the Second World War, bringing voices from America and Europe together to consider what has transpired. The last section moves from the emphasis on rhythm to a major key cadence accompanying the description of a deportee with a beautiful voice. One of the masterpieces of the late twentieth century, Different Trains is a piece that delves into issues of ethnicity and religious persecution that are, sadly, all too present in today’s society.  

The renditions by Kronos are irreplaceable, but Mivos creates compelling complementary readings. Recommended.

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