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Home   >   Projects   >   Steve Reich - Three String Quartets   >   Press Release

Track Listing:

1
Reich: WTC 9/11: I. 9/11/01 03:38
 
2
WTC 9/11: II. 2010 (Pt. 1) 00:52
 
3
WTC 9/11: II. 2010 (Pt. 2) 05:14
 
4
WTC 9/11: II. 2010 (Pt. 3) 01:21
 
5
WTC 9/11: III. WTC 04:37
 
6
Triple Quartet: I. (Pt. 1) 02:41
 
7
Triple Quartet: I. (Pt. 2) 02:24
 
8
Triple Quartet: I. (Pt. 3) 02:05
 
9
Triple Quartet: II. 04:05
 
10
Triple Quartet: III. 03:32
 
11
Different Trains: I. America - Before the War (Pt. 1) 06:22
 
12
Different Trains: I. America - Before the War (Pt. 2) 02:37
 
13
Different Trains: II. Europe - During the War 02:20
 
14
Different Trains: II. Europe - During the War (Pt. 1) 04:09
 
15
Different Trains: II. Europe - During the War (Pt. 3) 01:01
 
16
Different Trains: III. After the War (Pt. 1) 04:45
 
17
Different Trains: III. After the War (Pt. 2) 02:34
 
18
Different Trains: III. After the War (Pt. 3)
 

Mivos Quartet :

Steve Reich - Three String Quartets

“… among the great composers of the century” - The New York Times

Mivos Quartet Present the Definitive Recording of Steve Reich’s Three String Quartets

Steve Reich: The String Quartets brings the trilogy together for the first time on one recording

Mivos Quartet’s readings endorsed by Steve Reich himself

Released by Deutsche Grammophon today

Between 1988 and 2010, Steve Reich composed three string quartets – Different Trains, Triple Quartet and WTC 9/11. Deutsche Grammophon now presents this trilogy of works for the first time on one album, in definitive new recordings from the Mivos Quartet. Hailed by The Chicago Reader as “one of America’s most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles”, the Mivos players developed their interpretations of the three quartets – inspired by the music of speech, echoes of Bartók and the events of a day transformed by terror – in close collaboration with the composer. Steve Reich: The String Quartets, featuring notes by veteran radio host and music writer John Schaefer, is set for release digitally, on CD and on vinyl (2 LPs) today. “9/11/01”, the first movement of WTC 9/11, was issued as a single on Friday 18 November.

Dedicated to performing music by contemporary composers, Mivos first programmed Reich’s three quartets in one concert at the Jewish Museum in New York City in February 2016 and have played the works often since then. It was Reich himself who invited the ensemble to take on the challenge of recording all three for a single album. The composer, who recently marked his 86th birthday, supported the project from inception to completion, answering the group’s questions about fine musical details, offering advice on matters of style and endorsing the finished album.

Described by The New Yorker as “the most original musical thinker of our time”, Steve Reich made his name in the 1960s and 1970s with works marked by their use of shifting rhythmic patterns and phases. His compositional process seemed less than conducive to writing for four individual instrumentalists, but the change came in 1988, when he experimented with treating the string quartet as a single instrument.

Reich’s music had embraced speech melody during the 1980s, opening to the expressive rise and fall of spoken languages. At the end of the decade, this led to Different Trains, his first string quartet, in which he combined live performance with pre-recorded speech and additional layers of pre-recorded music to recall the cross-country train journeys he made from New York to California in the early 1940s after his parents divorced. The piece also considers the very different train rides taken at the same time by other Jewish children, in Europe, to Nazi death or concentration camps.

Triple Quartet (1998) is purely instrumental, requiring one quartet to record music for two other quartets and perform the first quartet part together with the tape playback. The piece, influenced by the pulsating rhythms that propel the final movement of Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, generates the intense energy of its two outer movements above a repeated progression of four chords. Its slow central movement presents a clear counterpoint built from short melodic ideas, evolving into a canon for all twelve voices of the three quartets.

Steve Reich: The String Quartets opens with the composer’s most recent work in the genre, WTC 9/11, which like Different Trains is built around voice recordings, in this case made during or after the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Completed in 2010, it precisely matches instrumental lines to the vocal intonation of air traffic controllers, people phoning emergency services or reflecting on the horror and disbelief that overcame eyewitnesses to one of the defining events of the present century. WTC 9/11 also includes recordings of the psalms sung in Hebrew by those who sat with the bodies of the dead, a tradition associated with easing the passage of souls into the afterlife.

The composer’s son observed the immediate aftermath of the attack from his nearby apartment. He was on the phone to Reich when the South Tower collapsed. The fear felt by the father for his son, daughter-in-law and infant grandchild flowed into the music of WTC 9/11. “If music doesn’t come out of emotional intensity,” he said shortly before the work’s premiere in 2011, “that music doesn’t last.”

Artist   Title     Time                

Mivos Quartet Reich: WTC 9/11: I. 9/11/01   03:38               

Mivos Quartet Reich: WTC 9/11: II. 2010 (Pt. 1)        00:52               

Mivos Quartet Reich: WTC 9/11: II. 2010 (Pt. 2)        05:14               

Mivos Quartet Reich: WTC 9/11: II. 2010 (Pt. 3)        01:21               

Mivos Quartet Reich: WTC 9/11: III. WTC      04:37               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Triple Quartet: I. (Pt. 1)            02:41               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Triple Quartet: I. (Pt. 2)            02:24               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Triple Quartet: I. (Pt. 3)            02:05               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Triple Quartet: II.         04:05               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Triple Quartet: III.        03:32               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Different Trains: I. America - Before the War (Pt. 1)   06:22               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Different Trains: I. America - Before the War (Pt. 2)   02:37               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Different Trains: II. Europe - During the War  02:20               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Different Trains: II. Europe - During the War (Pt. 1)    04:09               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Different Trains: II. Europe - During the War (Pt. 3)    01:01               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Different Trains: III. After the War (Pt. 1)        04:45               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Different Trains: III. After the War (Pt. 2)        02:34               

Mivos Quartet Reich: Different Trains: III. After the War (Pt. 3)        03:06