The Colin Currie Group formed 20 years ago to honour Steve Reich’s 70th birthday with a performance of Drumming. This year, the great American composer turns 90, making this, the group’s fourth Reich album on Currie’s own label, a double celebration.
Sextet, hailing from 1985, features two keyboardists playing piano and synthesisers alongside four percussionists on marimbas, vibraphones, bass drums, crotales, sticks and tam-tams. Shifting patterns interlock with the precision of a Swiss watch across one of the composer’s typical fast, slow, fast, slow, fast arcs. Currie’s recording flickers with subtle nuances with a naturalistic sound less closely mic’d than in Reich’s own classic accounts.
Tag Archive: Steve Reich
Joe Hisaishi Conducts… documents a concert given at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall on 31 July 2024. There Hisaishi performed his own ‘The End of the World’ suite in a version as well as his friend and colleague Steve Reich’s ‘The Desert Music’.
Inspired by a visit to New York City in 2007, Hisaishi composed ‘The End of the World’ as a three-movement suite that explores the chaos resulting from the collapse of global order in the aftermath of 9/11. By 2015, Hisaishi had transformed the suite into a five-movement work. Reich’s ‘Desert Music’ was inspired by three American deserts with historical and personal significance.
For the concert, Hisaishi was joined by Future Orchestra Classics, an orchestra of young…
Three months ago, Nonesuch brought out an updated version of its superbly comprehensive survey of Steve Reich’s collected works. The 27 discs included the first recordings of Reich’s most recent scores, Traveler’s Prayer and Jacob’s Ladder, and now, for those who already owned the set from its previous incarnation, it has released those two works together on their own. Both pieces were composed during the Covid lockdown, and are scored for four singers and an instrumental ensemble; in both cases, too, they have Hebrew texts taken from the Old Testament.
In almost every other respect, though, the two pieces are very different. Traveler’s Prayer, first performed in 2021, is meditative and static, floating, almost ritualised.
Nonesuch Records releases Steve Reich Collected Works, a twenty-seven-disc box set featuring music recorded during composer Steve Reich’s forty years on the label, on March 14, 2025, available to pre-order here.
The collection represents six decades of Reich’s compositions, ranging from It’s Gonna Rain (1965) to first recordings of his two latest works: Jacob’s Ladder (2023) and Traveler’s Prayer (2020). Two extensive booklets contain new essays by longtime Nonesuch President Robert Hurwitz, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, Steve Reich and Musicians percussionist Russell Hartenberger, producer Judith Sherman, and composer Nico Muhly, as well as a comprehensive listener’s guide by pianist and composer Timo Andres.