MUSIC REVIEW: Bang on a Can Plays Steve Reich at MASS MoCA

Submitted by Seth Rogovoy on July 26, 2009 - 3:19pm
Classical Music

 

MASS MoCA
Bang on a Can Plays Steve Reich
Saturday, July 25, 2009
 
 
Review by Seth Rogovoy
 
 
(North Adams, Mass., July 25, 2009) – There is great beauty in the compositions of Steve Reich, often, for lack of a better term, called minimalist works. They are architectural and mathematical in the best sense: they are ordered with balance and symmetry, even when they subtly veer from steady pulse and rhythm, as they often do. While in some ways they hark back to the perfectly ordered fugues of Bach, they are also utterly modern in the way they evoke the industrial process, machinelike in their rhythms, or even more contemporary, in the way they recall digital pulses.
 
 
Reich’s influence is heard and felt everywhere: his music is often the soundtrack for dance and film, his innovations inform the work of Philip Glass, Brian Eno, and Radiohead. His music inhabits concert stages wherever his own ensemble (Steve Reich and Musicians) performs, as well as wherever groups such as the Kronos Quartet, for whom he often composes, travel.
 
 
In the hands of the fellows and faculty of the Bang on a Can Summer Institute at MASS MoCA on Saturday night, three of Pulitzer Prize-winner Reich’s early, seminal works were given revealing, explosive interpretations that found the very human element – the heartbeat, and literally, the human breath – inside these lattice-like works based on mathematical formulas.
 
 
Music for 18 Musicians, the culminating piece, was majestic, triumphant. The bellows-like pulse that originated with female vocalists and traveled through bass clarinets and violins – most notably that of new-music superstar Todd Reynolds – gained dimensionality, immediacy, and an all-too-human tragic quality wholly unfamiliar from recordings of the piece. This listener has rarely been so emotionally moved by a performance, nearly brought to tears by Reich’s intuitive understanding of the relationship between man and machine, both beautiful and horrifying.
 
 
This piece, as well as the two played in the first half of the program – Piano Phase/Video Phase, performed by Bang on a Can percussionist David Cossin, and Eight Lines, performed by a student-faculty ensemble, and majestically conducted by Brad Lubman – appear to be incredibly fragile. They all seemed so vulnerable; anything could go wrong, one thought, and if it did, the whole piece would collapse upon itself.
 
 
That tension in part powered the performances, and the fact that it never happened was a tribute to the players and to Reich’s genius as a composer in making allowances for the human element, even in these highly regimented works, that, according to his notes, do allow for some modicum of improvisation (in terms of the length of notes held, relying on the particular wind power of the players on stage).
 
 
It was equally impressive to see the massive Hunter Center filled to capacity with concertgoers eager to hear this work – work that rarely gets programmed, for example, at music festivals such as Tanglewood or in other playhouses and concert halls in the region.
 
 
There is obviously an audience – and, particularly, a much younger audience than one would find at Tanglewood or at any other classical music concert series – hungering for this music. Would that we hear more of Reich’s music, pieces like Different Trains, Tehillim, and Your Are (Variations).
 
 
 
MASS MoCA would also seem an ideal venue for a production of The Cave, his multimedia opera collaboration with his wife, video artist Beryl Korot. And North Adams in particular would be a poignant setting for Reich’s Daniel Variations, his composition written in memory of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who got his start in journalism as a reporter for the city’s Transcript.
 
 
 
For now, we will happily make do with Saturday night’s concert, and other performances of Reich’s music heard annually during Bang on a Can’s summer residency at MASS MoCA.
 
  
 

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s editor-in-chief. He first garnered a CRMA award for General Criticism in part for a column on the music of Steve Reich.

 

 
 
 
 

 

 

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