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Different Trains
Steve Reich
The Smith Quartet
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"... the Smith Quartet's intense sound re-emphasises the
rhapsodic ending of the work. Duet and Triple Quartet are also
featured here and are played to perfection"
Sunday Independent |
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"the Smith Quartet on the admirable Signum label is beautifully
clear, and played with a rather touching delicacy which brings out the
subtle poetry of the ending" BBC Music
Magazine
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"This five-star Signum issue ... conveys the
emotional power or Reich's uncompromising writing"
Music Week |
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"the Smiths are impressive in both pieces"
The Guardian |
Steve Reich
 Born
in New York, Steve Reich graduated with honors in philosophy from
Cornell University in 1957. He subsequently studied composition with Hall
Overton, and from 1958 to 1961 he studied at the Juilliard School of Music
with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti.
At Mills College in 1963
he received his M.A. in Music and had the opportunity to work with Luciano
Berio and Darius Milhaud. Steve Reich studied drumming at the Institute
for African Studies at the University of Ghana in Accra, Balinese Gamelan
Semar Pegulingan and Gamelan Gambang at the American Society for Eastern
Arts in Seattle and Berkeley, California and he also studied the
traditional forms of cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew scriptures in
New York and Jerusalem.
In 1966 Steve Reich founded his own ensemble of
three musicians, which rapidly grew to 18 members or more.
Mr. Reich’s
1988 piece, Different Trains, marked a new compositional method, in which
speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments.
Over the years, Steve Reich has received commissions from the Barbican
Centre London, the Holland Festival; San Francisco Symphony; the Rothko
Chapel; Vienna Festival, Hebbel Theater, Berlin, the Brooklyn Academy of
Music for guitarist Pat Metheny; Spoleto Festival USA, West German Radio,
Cologne; Settembre Musica, Torino, the Fromm Music Foundation for
clarinetist Richard Stoltzman; the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra; Betty
Freeman for the Kronos Quartet; and the Festival d’Automne, Paris, for the
200th anniversary of the French Revolution.
teve Reich’s music has been
performed by major orchestras and ensembles around the world.
In
1994 Steve Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters,
to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1995, and, in 1999, awarded
Commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et Lettres. The year 2000 brought five
additional honors: the Schuman Prize from Columbia University, the
Montgomery Fellowship from Dartmouth College, the Regent’s Lectureship at
the University of California at Berkeley, an honorary doctorate from the
California Institute of the Arts and Musical America’s Composer of the
Year.
Reprinted by kind permission of
Boosey & Hawkes
Steve Reich's website can be seen at www.stevereich.com
- Recorded:
January and February 2005 at TCM Studios,
London
- Producer:
The Smith Quartet
- Engineering and Mixing:
David Sheppard
DUET & TRIPLE QUARTET
- Recorded:
June 4, 5, 6 and 7 2005, Konk
Studios, London
- Producer:
Martin Cotton
- Engineer:
Mike Hatch
Editing and Mastering:
Limo Hearn, Floating Earth
Booklet Notes:
Francis Pott
Artwork
& Design:
Woven Design
Cover Image:
Getty Images
Copyright:
© Copyright 2005 Signum Records Ltd
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