Following their internationally acclaimed recording of Steve Reich's masterpiece Music For 18 Musicians, Ensemble Signal and Brad Lubman present two recent pieces by the composer: Double Sextet from 2007 and Radio Rewrite from 2012. Double Sextet is scored for two sextets of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano. It won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music - the first for the composer. Radio Rewrite is a work for instrumental ensemble inspired by two songs by the British rock band Radiohead - ''Jigsaw Falling into Place'' and ''Everything in Its Right Place.'' The piece represents the first time that Reich has reworked material from western pop/rock music. These strong, tuneful, energetic, tightly made works receive impassioned performances from Ensemble Signal, who The New York Times has called 'one of the most vital groups of its kind.'

As more ensembles perform and record Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, its status as a minimalist masterpiece is increasingly affirmed. Ensemble Signal's 2015 release on Harmonia Mundi is one of several amazing performances that have matched Reich's original ECM New Series recording in technical brilliance and expressivity, and it has even earned the composer's approval for being, "…fast moving, spot on, and emotionally charged." Under the direction of Brad Lubman, Ensemble Signal maintains a relentlessly steady pulse and articulates the interlocking patterns with absolute precision, though the shifting tone colors are perhaps a little clearer in this performance than in other recordings. The microphone placement is not so close that individual instruments stand out, but there is enough separation of parts to allow some sense of direction and the orientation of the smaller sub-groups of pianos, xylophones, marimbas, strings, clarinets, and voices. This is a mesmerizing performance that will transfix listeners, and the music is so compelling that it will linger on well after the CD stops. Highly recommended.

Bomb! Box set on Nonesuch with 27 discs (26 CDs + 1 DVD) in wallets, plus two booklets (132 + 120 pages). 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.

The hook for this terrific recording of three of Steve Reich's most attractive works is the use of alternate versions of the several pieces that differ from the original recordings on Nonesuch. This recording has Reich's imprimatur; he enthusiastically recommends the performances in a program note. The most radical departure from the original version is Piano Counterpoint, Vincent Corver's arrangement of Six Pianos for a single live pianist with the other five parts prerecorded. This allows the piece to fit nicely into Reich's "Counterpoint" series, which includes Vermont Counterpoint for flutes and New York Counterpoint for clarinets. Corver also speeds up the tempo so the piece has an even more propulsive aural energy, although in live performance it's hard to beat the visceral excitement of six pianists on-stage. The London Steve Reich Ensemble version of the Triple Quartet, unlike the Kronos Quartet's premiere recording, uses three live quartets, and is one of three performance options that Reich specified in the score, the third being an orchestral version with 36 players. This is the first commercial recording of this version.

Digitally remastered edition of this 1971 release. Steve Reich remains one of the most important figures in 20th century music. Though he studied at the prestigious arts institutions Julliard and Mills College, by the mid-1960s Reich set about dismantling the very orthodoxy that he had been trained in. Four Organs is the ultimate minimalist composition. Performed by Reich, Phillip Glass, Art Murphy and Steve Chambers, four identical Farfisa organs strike a single chord and gradually lengthen each note to produce polyrhythms between the players. Anchored by Jon Gibsons stoically-steady pulse on maracas, the piece deconstructs its opening burst to a sustained mass of sound - stretching the tones to create (in Reichs words) slow-motion music. Inspired by Reichs early training on drums, Phase Patterns treats the keyboards like tuned percussion instruments: a basic rhythm pattern is played in unison and almost imperceptibly increases tempo to move out-of-sync. Each progressive cycle emphasizes unique figures that are not generated by an individual alone, but rather emerge from the communal expression of the group. Originally released on Shandar in 1971, Four Organs / Phase Patterns is one of the most highly regarded avant-garde recordings in the past 50 years. This CD release features cover photography by artist Michael Snow and is recommended for fans of Neu!, Glenn Branca and Tim Hecker.

Mahan Esfahani veröffentlicht sein Debütalbum “Time Present and Time Past”, und damit erscheint auch die erste Cembalo Veröffentlichung bei Deutsche Grammophon seit über 30 Jahren! Sein Album, das maßgeblich durch Gedichte von T.S. Elliot inspiriert wurde, vereint Barockmusik von Bach und Corelli mit minimalistischen Klängen von Komponisten wie Reich und Gorecki. Mit seinen eingängigen Interpretationen begeistert Esfahani nicht nur seine Zuhörer für das historische Tasteninstrument, durch die Begleitung des “Concerto Köln”, einem auf historische Aufführungspraxis spezialisierten Orchester, gelingt es ihm, die Musik besonders authentisch wirken zu lassen.

For all the agony as to the status of classical music in the modern musical landscape, the three 20th century string quartets on this fine French release can be said to have entered the repertory, with a reach that extends far beyond the U.S. They go quite well together, which is the first point in favor of France's Quatuor Diotima here; both Steve Reich's Different Trains, for string quartet and tape, and George Crumb's Black Angels for electric quartet feature an artificially enhanced string quartet, and even Samuel Barber elected to "enhance" his String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11, by orchestrating its central movement and making it into the famous Adagio for strings. Highly recommended.

"After the widely noticed performance at the „Acht Brücken Festival 2016” at Cologne's Philharmonic Hall, Gregor Schwellenbach, Hauschka, Erol Sarp (of „Grandbrothers“), Daniel Brandt, Paul Frick (both of "Brandt Brauer Frick") and John Kameel Farah will be releasing their interpretation of Steve Reich’s "Six Pianos" as a studio recording via FILM. The re-recording of this piece is an interpretation of Reich’s composition but still far more than just that – it is a modern approach to his idea behind it. "Keyboard Study #1" by Terry Riley is a worthy b-side opposed to Reich’s composition. The piece is kind of a building set of ever lengthening, repetitive patterns played against each other with the right and left hand displaced. The composition proposes various possible combinations for the performer to choose from and repeat at will. And what the performers have chosen proves Gregor Schwellenbach’s assumption: "Especially Terry Riley’s and Steve Reich’s music are open doors for pianists socialized by pop music and their audience".

Neil Campbell teams up with Carlo Bowry (Muffin Men/Wizards of Twiddly) and composer/producer Gordon Ross for a release featuring Philip Glass's composition Metamorphosis (beautifully re-arranged as a classical and electric guitar duet), and Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint performed with multiple classical guitars and basses.

This collection of music for guitar, brought together by Jose Luis Bieito as the musical element of his music+image binomis, Reflections, possesses a delightful balance of sounds. These are flowing, pulsing, mostly gentle sounds that tend to soothe and calm the listener's mind. Sounds that - through a variety of compositional techniques - tend to be sustained in time; the effects of which can sometimes capture a listener’s attention, holding it inside an extended musical moment, like a spell. When heard while viewing the accompanying (provocative, sometimes disturbing) images, the sounds can serve an additional function: grounding the listener's reaction, enabling the passage of emotion; like electricity discharging through a lightening rod.

If Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians is simply described in terms of its materials and organization – 11 chords followed by 11 pieces built on those chords – then it might seem utterly dry and monotonous. The actual music, though, is far from lackluster. When this recording was released in 1978, the impact on the new music scene was immediate and overwhelming. Anyone who saw potential in minimalism and had hoped for a major breakthrough piece found it here. The beauty of its pulsing added-note harmonies and the sustained power and precision of the performance were the music's salient features; and instead of the sterile, electronic sound usually associated with minimalism, the music's warm resonance was a welcome change. Yet repeated listening brought out a subtle and important shift in Reich's conception: the patterns were no longer static repetitions moving in and out of phase with each other, but were now flexible units that grew organically and changed incrementally over the course of the work.

Alarm Will Sound's recording of Steve Reich's monumental orchestral/choral works The Desert Music and Tehillim, released on the Cantaloupe label in 2002, greatly benefits from the group's close connections with the composer: the ensemble's conductor, Alan Pierson, and several of the performers studied at the Eastman School with Brad Lubman, a conductor frequently enlisted by Reich. Also, Pierson's arrangements, which reconcile the chamber and orchestral versions that exist for both works, were prepared in close consultation with the composer; thus, this may well be the definitive recording of these pieces. Brilliantly sonorous in their climaxes – the burst of light near the end of Desert Music, the "Alleluias" that close Tehillim – the players also articulate Reich's intricate canonic textures with nimble precision.

GRAMMY WINNER, 59TH AWARDS: Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. Third Coast Percussion has been saluted by the Washington Post for its virtuosity and precisely timed wit, and was called by the New York Times a commandingly elegant ensemble. The group, which is ensemble-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame, teaches and performs a concert series in Chicago, and has commissioned dozens of new works. This album is the ensembles Cedille label debut, and is an 80th birthday acknowledgement to American composer Steve Reich, the founding father of musical minimalism. This recording features four of Reichs most notable percussion works.

There’s something special about this version of Different Trains. It’s the one commissioned by Wolfgang Sawallisch and David Robertson and their respective orchestras (Philadelphia and Lyon) in 2001 for string orchestra, and it impresses immediately by the richness of its vastly expanded sound palette. Though it may be heresy to say so, I never found the original string quartet version entirely convincing. This recording shows why: inside that frenetic chamber work was a much larger piece trying to get out, and here it is, fully realised, as it were, in glorious technicolor.

Initially conceived as a moral and artistic response to human suffering, violinist Edna Michell's Compassion also became a touching tribute to her mentor and source of inspiration, Yehudi Menuhin, on his death in 1999. The 15 compositions commissioned by Michell for the project revolve around the themes of suffering and charity in fairly abstract or suggestive ways, with few programmatic, religious, or political points made beyond the allusive titles. As a practical matter for curious listeners, this CD is a comprehensive sampler of contemporary musical trends, and the leading lights of two generations of composers are generously represented in the CD's 80 minutes. Established figures such as Karel Husa, Lukas Foss, György Kurtág, Hans Werner Henze, Wolfgang Rihm, Philip Glass, John Tavener, Steve Reich, and Iannis Xenakis share the program with rising composers Shulamit Ran, Chen Yi, Yinam Leef, Betty Olivero, Poul Ruders, and Somei Satoh.