R10 • REVIEW

THE GLOBE AND MAIL
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2006

AtoasttothesoundofReich
CLASSICAL
Music on Main
At Heritage Hall
In Vancouveron Tuesday
REVIEWED
BY ELISSAPOOLE

T

he celebrated American
composer Steve Reich, one
of the few composers in the
classical world with near
rock-star status, had his 70th birthday on Tuesday. Reich will be feted
throughout the year, with the
Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center all
hosting concerts in his hometown
New York, a retrospective at the
Barbican in London, performances
in numerous major international
cities and a five-disc compilation
from Nonesuch Records.
Here in Vancouver, a snappy new
series called Music on Main timed
its first concert to coincide with the
date of Reich's birth and turned its
opening night into a four-part miniseries of his music. Programming
included the early and seminal
tape-loop piece Come Out (1966)
and other phase pieces of the 1960s
and early 1970s such as Piano Phase
(performed by Vern Griffiths and
Lauri Lister on marimbas) and
Drumming (Part I only, for four
bongo players); the North Ameri-

can premiere of the octet version of
Cello Counterpoint, a performance
by the Waterloo, Ont-based Penderecki String Quartet of Different
Trains; and, late in the evening,
some Reich-inspired jazz.
For many of us of a certain age,
Reich's music was as much a part of
our youth as the Rolling Stones or
Bob Dylan. We learned how to listen in a particular way through
those phase pieces, and even hearing so many of them back to back
on Tuesday didn't quite take away
their capacity to fascinate, mesmerize. That goes double for Come
Out, a stunning metaphor for dehumanization that pulls a phrase of
spoken text looped on one channel
(a description by a young black
man of being beaten by police during the Harlem riots of 1964) progressively out of phase with a duplicate loop on a second channel, until what was once speech morphs
into a machine-like noise.
Reich took up that thread again
with Different Trains in 1988, using
speech fragments to generate musical motives and juxtaposing his
own childhood memories - of being shuttled regularly by train
across the United States from one
divorced parent to the other -with
those of three contemporaries, Holocaust survivors with dramatically
different memories of train trips.
Constructed like a series of linked
box cars, each differentiated by its

Formanyof usof a certain
age,Reich'smusicwasas
mucha part of ouryouthas
the RollingStonesor Bob
Dylan.We learnedhowto
listenin a particularway
throughthosephasepieces,
andevenhearingsomanyof
thembackto backon
Tuesdaydidn'tquitetake
awaytheircapacityto
fascinate,mesmerize.
own texture, motive and tempo, the
whole suggests a momentum that
belies the composer's capacity for
choice. It is one of Reich's most
powerful works, one that invests
minirnalism's defining, cool detachment with the emotional
charge of personal and political
statement.
Critical to any performance of
Different Trains - which superimposes a live quartet performance
over a recording of sampled sirens
and train whistles, spoken text and
four additional
string-quartet
tracks - is the sound system. It was
a shame that the Penderecki Quar-

tet was so dominant in the mix on
Tuesday, for the words were almost
impossible to understand. With no
printed text provided, those unfamiliar with the piece could easily
have found themselves grooving to
the music (perish the thought) as if
it were one of Reich's more abstract
compositions.
The weakest piece was Cello
Counterpoint, one of a series of
works (Electric Counterpoint for
guitarist Pat Metheny is perhaps
the best known) that explore the
perceptual surprises that arise from
placing multiple layers of the same
instrumental timbre in counterpoint. Performed live, these pieces
are acutely sensitive to intonation
and Tuesday's version with eight local Vancouver cellists suffered from
a lack of precision; more significantly, its placement after Different
Trains gave Cello Counterpoint the
appearance of a piece without a raison d'etre.
Music on Main's formula of 20
minutes at the bar for every 40 minutes of music left a smaller, albeit
more lubricated audience for the
last set. But if the Coat Cooke Trio's
improvisations were only obliquely
Reichian, Kenton Loewen's volatile,
hyper-delicate, timbrally ingenious
drumming was all it needed to be,
an apposite and high-wire send-off
for a promising new series.
FRED R. CONRAD/THE NEW YORKTIMES

Special to The Globe and Mail

Composer Steve Reich recently celebrated his 70th birthday.