At 70, Reich Still Carries a Tune

In this anniversary year for Mozart and Shostakovich, there is another musical luminary who is being celebrated: the minimalist pioneer Steve Reich, who turned 70 on Oct. 3. He's also the only one of these artists who can take part in the festivities.

Once an obscure name whose music was performed at art galleries and lofts, Reich is now having his 70th birthday celebrated throughout city this October at venues including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and Brooklyn Academy of Music. Though Reich has never gained the popularity of Philip Glass-whose own work, especially early on, was influenced by Reich-the power and originality of his eclectic oeuvre is unparalleled. After dance performances at BAM and master classes at Carnegie earlier this month, Reich was feted on Saturday night in a program of three masterpieces performed by the ensembles for whom they were composed.

Wearing his signature baseball hat, Reich stood at the back of a packed house for the first half of Saturday's concert at Stern Auditorium. Looking a miraculously young 70, Reich hovered over the equalizer with the techies as they supervised the equipment during two works that fuse live performance with prerecorded sound.

Jazz guitar legend Pat Metheny was on hand to interpret 1987's "Electric Counterpoint," which he premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival. Bathed in a spotlight that created a halo above his puffy dirty-blond hair, he strummed and picked his way through a 15-minute work, which pits an acoustic guitar against a prerecorded tape of the artist performing on multiple guitars and electric basses. The soloist provides contrapuntal melodic patterns to the recorded material. In the hands of a less skilled performer, the plethora of interlocking rhythmic and melodic patterns might threaten to subsume the soloist. But Metheny kept abreast of the tape and retained his supremacy throughout. The tape cushioned Metheny's eclectic style, which alternately sounded bluesy, Celtic, Western, and even baroque.

The ever-popular Kronos Quartet assumed the stage for the Grammy-winning "Different Trains," which is scored for string quartet and tape. The melodic material for the piece is derived from speech patterns. The piece reflects Reich's experience journeying cross-country in the 1940s, which is pitted against the experience of European Jews who were deported to concentration camps around the same time. The voice samples, from interviews with Reich's former governess, Holocaust survivors, and a train conductor, generate the material that is explored by the instruments. The tape includes fragments of these interviews repeated over and over amid recorded train noises and three prerecorded string quartets. The fragmentary and droning qualities of speech and music combine. Sensitive to this disconcerting jumble of sounds, the Kronos players convincingly imitated both voices and train noises, including the hum of a steam locomotive and sirens, in this haunting and elegiac work.

After intermission came Reich's monumental "Music for 18 Musicians." This hour-long piece, which Reich spent two years working on, was among the composer's first forays into large-scale composition. Steve Reich and Musicians, the ensemble that Reich formed in the early '70s to perform his works, were joined by soloists from Synergy Vocals. The eclectic musical force included clarinets, strings, pianos, and assorted percussion. Reich himself performed at one of four pianos, and briefly migrated to the marimbas.

The pianos and percussion maintain the pulsating rhythm of the piece throughout, while the sopranos, altos, and clarinets each hold a note for as long as possible. The overlapping patterns created by the "breathing" of the soloists result in a wavy, perpetual-motion-like effect. Amid the steady tempo of the percussion and pianos, they add to the piece's meditative and trance-like effect. The piece has a tight harmonic structure in which a cycle of 11 chords (heard at the work's beginning) receives a thorough and inventive deconstruction. There were many bobbing heads in the audience amid the metronomic violin and chimes, and at times the music sounded practically religious. The performative aspect added another dimension to the experience, with the ritual-like spectacle complimenting the auditory one: the methodical tapping of the percussionists, the clarinetists growing red in the face, and the posture of the soloists, chanting perpetually into their microphones.

When the final notes died away, the entire audience leapt to their feet in wild applause, which only increased as Metheny and the Kronos Quartet came on stage for a final bow. The loudest applause, of course, was reserved for Reich himself.