Back in the 1960’s Steve Reich hit on a marvellously
simple idea. He noticed that if a fragment of recorded interview was
looped and recorded interview was looped and repeated, a melodic pattern
would mysteriously emerge from it. In Different Trains, written in 1988,
he elaborated on this idea, taking phrases from interviews with travellers
and train staff and weaving them into a continuous musical texture of live
and pre-recorded string quartets. The effectiveness of the piece hinges on
the audibility of the process. We hear a musical motif suggested in the
voice, and enjoy the way its made hard and definite – crystallised, you
might say – in the thick weave of the layers quartet parts.
Where so much of the music is predetermined by
pre-recorded tapes and speech samples, the space for different
interpretation is severely limited. Nonetheless there are significant
differences in the three recording currently available. The one on Disques Montaignes has the arrangement Reich made of different trains
for string orchestra, alongside the orchestral version of another price
for multi-tracked string quartet, Triple Quartet. It’s played by the
Orchestre National de Lyon with finesse and dancing energy, but seem
somehow impersonal and distant compared to the original quartet version.
This is now available in two recordings: the new one by 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
(Reich isn’t often credited with a power to move, but he certainly shows
it here). But in the end I found I narrowly preferred the recording on
Elektra/Nonesuch made by the work’s original dedicates, the Kronos
Quartet. It has a more incisive dancing energy, a warmer and fuller sound,
and is every bit a s alert to the music’s understated pathos.
The only CD rivals to these recordings are those on Nonesuch by the
Kronos Quartet, who gave the first performances of both works. Those
performances are only available on separate discs, however, each coupled
with other works by Reich, so the Smith Quartet have the field to
themselves for anyone wanting his works for string quartet together. The
two pieces are strikingly different. In the semi autobiographical Different Trains the use of pre-recorded interviews generates the
speech melodies on which the whole work is based, and places it closer to
the documentary style of Reich’s video operas than to his other
instrumental pieces. Triple Quartet is a virtuoso compositional exercise
in which the live quartet is heard against two recordings of itself in a
12-part texture. If lacking quite the rhythmic edge and tension the Kronos
bring to this music, the Smiths are impressive in both pieces. Also
included is the exquisite little Duet from 1994, in which Reich’s music
sounds disconcertingly like Arvo Part’s.
Music Week 14th August 2005
Steve Reich's Different Trains, completed in the late Eighties, has
lost none of its power to shock and challenge. Its relevance is driven
home in this compelling performance by the Smith Quartet, recorded at the
time of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The
work contrasts Reich's childhood experiences of train journeys across the
US with those of European Jews deported to the death camps. This five-star
Signum issue, released on September 5, conveys the emotional power or
Reich's uncompromising writing.
Andrew Stewart
Musical Pointers - July 2005
The Smith Quartet have taken upon themselves the UK mantle of the
pioneering Kronos Quartet and present here works for extended quartet with
which the Kronos were first associated.
Triple Quartet required pre-recorded tapes which they made so that the
instrumentation as heard is a twelve piece string ensemble. It is all
fluently and efficiently done, with impeccable recording and engineering.
But is more less on CD? I suspect the experience would be far more vivid
and effective seen with live quartet flanked by two absent ensembles heard
through loudspeakers either side? presumable a good alternative (worth
doing in a college chamber music department?) would be to have it played
by three quartets, possibly programmed with Mendelssohn's Octet and
Milhaud's Octet (his Quartets Nos 14 & 15, designed to be performed
simultaneously).
Duet for two violins with a chugging accompaniment by 4 violas and 4
celli (which must limit possible performance) is a simple and attractive
little piece written as a tribute to Menuhin's 'international
understanding'.
The core of Different Trains has is the use of repetitive
fragments of recollections of exciting train journeys in USA, and those of
Holocaust survivors settled in America who suffered contemporaneusly
memories of their horrific journeys to concentration camps in cattle
trucks. But in Reich's tape manipulation treatment they are totally
dehumanised. The contribution of the quartet is overwhelmed by the
supposedly evocative phrases of those recorded memories, speech samples
turned into 'speech melody', then imitated by Reich's writing for the
strings. Train noises are added to the mix and three string quartets are
added to the tape, all very clever but I found it unconvincing and
unmoving and - dare I say - exploitative on first hearing and do so again.
Undeniably popular with Kronos and Smith audiences, none of this is music
that I would want to hear again. But mine is a minority reaction, so you
should hear it for yourself.
Peter Grahame Woolf
The Daily Telegraph, 15th September 2005
Tracks devoted to the railways – The
Smith Quartet’s new recording will be launched in a train carriage.
The train now leaving… A first class train lounge isn't an obvious
choice of venue for launching a CD. But it seemed just right for the Smith
Quartet's new CD of Steve Reich's 1988 classic Different Trains, released
next Monday on the Signum label.
Different Trains: first class evocation of a vanished era
It's a piece that mingles the sound of string quartets (live and
pre-recorded) with the sound of trains, though not the prosaic sounds we
hear these days: they're the richly evocative whistles and horns and harsh
metallic scrapes of American and European trains from the 1930s and 1940s.
Reich's piece is an evocation of a vanished era, but it's much more
than that. It's also connected with his own disrupted childhood, and the
sinister uses of trains during the war in eastern Europe.
But none of this was on his mind when he started. "What got me going
was technology. I'd made tape pieces out of little bits of speech in the
'60s, treating them almost as if they were musical phrases which could be
repeated.
Then in 1988 I first came across a digital sampler, which really
excited me because it gave me a way of repeating phrases at intervals in a
precisely timed way. I didn't know what to do with this idea, until I got
a request from the American patroness Betty Freeman, for a new string
quartet to be performed by the Kronos Quartet. So I thought, why not
create a piece where the quartet would pick up and develop the melodies
hidden in verbal phrases".
It's a wonderfully simple, even naïve idea, which Reich has since
combined with images in his "video opera-documentaries" such as Three
Tales. But progress to begin with was slow, because Reich didn't at first
know what speech material to use.
At first he thought of using archive recordings of Hungarian composer
Bela Bartók, one of Reich's heroes and composer of the greatest quartets
of the 20th century, but he abandoned it ("I realised you don't want him
sitting on your shoulder when you're writing a string quartet.")
Then one day the idea of trains and the reminiscences of people who
travelled in them came "like a light-bulb" into his head. "I'd spent a lot
of time travelling on trains across the US between my parents, who had
divided custody of me after they divorced. I used to make these trips with
my nursemaid Victoria, and as she was still alive I started by recording
her. Then I discovered one or two very old retired stewards of the old
Pullman trains, and they were happy to talk about the old days."
But what about the European connection? Was that a later thought? "No,
it came straight away, because when I imagined myself travelling across
the US I thought of those other little Jewish boys forced to travel by
train at the same time, who never came back from their journey. I was told
of a recorded archive of Holocaust survivors".
Reich's piece features the voices of Holocaust survivors
The fleeting voices of those survivors can be heard in the second
movement of Reich's piece: "Lots of cattle wagons there - they shaved us -
they tattooed a number on our arms". It's a dark and compelling piece, but
there's a hint of radiance at the end, where one survivor remembers "they
loved to listen to the singing, the Germans".
When she stopped singing they said, "More, more". But it's only a hint,
as you'd expect from this most honest and least sentimental of composers.
"Yes, the oppressors are touched by music, but only for a minute.
Afterwards they go back to their killing. If there's one thing we learned
from the war, it's that artistic sensitivity doesn't make anybody into a
finer human being".
Ivan Hewitt
The Times, 16th September 2005
***
A shortish CD (47 minutes), though Steve Reich fans
shouldn’t take umbrage at what the disc offers: clear, propulsive
performances of two 15-year-old classics of minimalism with feeling, the
music and taped speech melange Different Trains, haunted by concentration
camps, and the more abstract Triple Quartet. The interwoven lines sound
clearer still in the Kronos Quartet’s versions. The comparative novelty,
Duet, is bland.
Geoff Brown
The scotsman.com
This is a dull,
minimalist journey that takes ages to get nowhere. Steve Reich composed
it in tribute to his wartime childhood days, when he regularly travelled
back and forth across America from one parent to the other. He implants
a deeper message - electronic snatches of speech from Jewish Holocaust
survivors and train sounds - than mere nostalgia, but the effect is
monotonous, even in this pristine performance by the Smith Quartet.
The multi-tracking by
the players is skilfully synchronised, as is the accompanying Triple
Quartet. Reich-lovers will drool, others should think twice.
Kenneth Walton
CD News
New Chamber Music Releases
The Kronos Quartet was ... responsible for Steve Reich’s
excursions into the string quartet repertoire. They commissioned Different Trains, one of his most successful scores, as well as the
Triple Quartet, one of his most derivative. The Smith Quartet has included
them on a single disc, lasting well under 50 minutes, alongside Duet, in a
version for two solo violins, four violas and four cellos.
In Different Trains Reich reverted to the use of the melodic and
rhythmic patterns of speech, with which he had embarked on the minimalist
experiment. They now functioned as the basis of the music for string
quartet, which, together with sounds associated with trains, produces a
haunting effect. Different Trains was also the first in a sequence of
documentary projects which decreased in success in proportion to their
increasing complexity, ultimately incorporating video.
Notwithstanding a few subtle nuances, especially in the slow movement,
the Triple Quartet pounds the rhythmic aspect of the second movement of
Bartók’s Fourth Quartet into oblivion, thereby minimizing the original.
Yet for anyone wishing to include an example of minimalism in their
collection, this interpretation of Different Trains is worth it.
John Warnaby
