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Stories   >   Steve Reich's Three String Quartets is fleshed out with strong attention to detail by the Mivos Quartet / TAKE EFFECT

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Steve Reich's Three String Quartets is fleshed out with strong attention to detail by the Mivos Quartet / TAKE EFFECT

Posted: July 24, 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, 

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.

Triple Quartet (1998) is purely instrumental, requiring one quartet to record music for two other quartets and perform the first quartet part together with the tape playback. The piece, influenced by the pulsating rhythms that propel the final movement of Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, generates the intense energy of its two outer movements above a repeated progression of four chords. Its slow central movement presents a clear counterpoint built from short melodic ideas, evolving into a canon for all twelve voices of the three quartets.

Steve Reich: The String Quartets opens with the composer’s most recent work in the genre, WTC 9/11, which like Different Trains is built around voice recordings, in this case made during or after the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Completed in 2010, it precisely matches instrumental lines to the vocal intonation of air traffic controllers, people phoning emergency services or reflecting on the horror and disbelief that overcame eyewitnesses to one of the defining events of the present century. WTC 9/11 also includes recordings of the psalms sung in Hebrew by those who sat with the bodies of the dead, a tradition associated with easing the passage of souls into the afterlife.

The composer’s son observed the immediate aftermath of the attack from his nearby apartment. He was on the phone to Reich when the South Tower collapsed. The fear felt by the father for his son, daughter-in-law and infant grandchild flowed into the music of WTC 9/11. “If music doesn’t come out of emotional intensity,” he said shortly before the work’s premiere in 2011, “that music doesn’t last.”


TAKE EFFECT writes….The New York-based Mivos Quartet recreate 3 of Steve Reich’s string quartets, all of which were inspired by the music of speech, echoes of Bartók and the events of a day transformed by terror.

“WTC 9/11” starts the listen with the an eerie backdrop and vocal soundbites before the haunting strings are mixed in with clips that outline the fear, panic and confusion of the day.

The middle track, “Triple Quartet”, illustrates the dynamic and precise interaction between the quartet, where the quivering strings emit both tension and grace in their very fluid delivery on the purely instrumental selection.

The final piece, the 3 chapters of “Different Trains”, is filled with an anxious energy that’s textured precisely with both live and pre-recorded pieces for effect.

Available for the first time on one album, Reich’s trilogy is fleshed out here with strong attention to detail, as the Mivos Quartet got plenty of input and insight from Reich for the project, and it makes for a substantial and flawless listen.

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