Reviews
At LA Phil: Reich/Richter Live Is a Revelation
LOS ANGELES--Now 86-years-young, Steve Reich has spent his ninth decade breaking out of some long-established comfort zones, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as a crucial partner. He wrote his first orchestral work in 30 years, Music for Ensemble and Orchestra, for the Phil, which premiered it and subsequently and recorded it 2018 (Nonesuch). And in Reich/Richter, premiered at New York’s The Shed in 2019, he worked with film for the first time, writing music for an abstract film by Gerhard Richter and Corinna Belz based on images from Richter’s book Patterns.
Reich/Richter was an LA Phil co-commission, but its path to this city has not been altogether smooth. Covid scotched its scheduled West Coast premiere in 2020 at the orchestra’s annual 12-hour Noon to Midnight marathon at Walt Disney Concert Hall. It was subsequently planned as part of the 2023 marathon on April 1, but somewhere along the way that event was quietly cancelled and it ended up as part of an all-Reich Green Umbrella concert.
Compared to the audio recording by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, released last June on Nonesuch, experiencing Reich/Richter in its full audio/visual glory in Disney Hall was a revelation.
Reich and Richter were made for each other. In the film, dozens of brightly colored horizontal lines gradually divide, subdivide, and morph into increasingly complex, quilt-like shapes that resemble creatures, Eastern religious symbols, or whatever the viewer’s imagination conjures. It’s a numbers’ game—the images divide in halves, quarters, eighths, and so forth, just as note values do in Reich’s recent compositions. The shapes gradually morph back into horizontal lines by the time the film ends, creating an arch form that has long been Reich’s preferred musical format.
Reich/Richter is divided formally into four sections, but the ear experiences it as one of Reich’s usual three-part, fast-slow-fast constructions. The most enticing music comes in the first half of the 37-minute piece; at one point somewhere in Part II it almost sounds as if Reich is translating prime Ravel into his own idiom.
Ultimately, it is the sheer sound of the piece live that makes it revelatory. Under Brad Lubman’s impressive control of dynamics and phrasing, and with some deftly applied amplification, the 14-member LA Phil New Music Group’s sound floated around the hall, enveloping the listener in a dream world. Too bad Nonesuch didn’t release Reich/Richter on a Blu-ray disc with surround-sound capability, or even an audio hybrid SACD.
Another recent Reich piece on the program, Traveler’s Prayer, written during the pandemic in 2020, follows an entirely different path. Set to texts of Genesis, Exodus, and Psalms, sung sotto voce by four voices that blend in almost invisibly with an eight-piece ensemble, Traveler’s Prayer maintains a low-key, sustained, austere, neo-Renaissance profile for all of its 12 minutes, reflective of Reich’s lifelong preference for music written before 1750. The sound floated through Disney Hall in its own meditative way.
Reich’s Double Sextet, which uses nearly the same instrumental configuration as Reich/Richter (minus the two oboes), opened the program, casting a deeper spell than usual in a hot, intricately knit performance that drove harder and harder as it approached the finish line.
The composer was on hand to take in the roaring ovations from the audience; the one-time radical disrupter of the serial status quo has become a revered, still vital elder statesman of American music.
Classical music coverage on Musical America is supported in part by a grant from the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. Musical America makes all editorial decisions.
