Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

A Wet Night in New York

I have just returned to NH from a weekend in the Big Apple, and on Saturday night we ventured out in the pouring rain to see Steve Reich and Musicians at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

They opened with Clapping Music, which is short, sweet, and elegant -- two performers clap out a simple pattern, and then one of them rotates the cell by one note, and they repeat the new configuration several times, and then rotate again. They repeat this cell rotation until the two clappers are back in phase, and it's over. I have of course heard the piece recorded, but it was fun to see it live.

Next on the program was Triple Quartet. It's a good piece, and I have always liked it, but it has never been high on my list of great Reich works. This performance bumped it up a notch. The piece is much more dense and dissonant than most of his other work, and on the Kronos Quartet CD (Nonesuch, 2001) that denseness is slightly oppressive. I like the recently released Orchestre National de Lyon recording of the string orchestra version better, since I find that the orchestral sound makes the dissonance more lush than harsh (the recording of Different Trains on the same disc is, however, painfully sloppy -- be warned). This performance was the string quartet version, but the hall gave the notes the breathing room they needed and the performance was the best of both worlds -- the intensity of the close-mic-ed solo strings but the lushness of the orchestral performance. If you have heard this piece and like it, try to find a live performance to attend.

After intermission, before the presentation of Three Tales, Steve Reich and Beryl Korot came out for a conversation with Howard Stokar. They sat in white armchairs on the stage, which seemed slightly silly to me, but the conversation they had was informative. The discussion of Three Tales was mostly familiar information, but they spoke briefly at the end about new works. Reich has written and just finished recording You Are (Variations) for singers and a mid-sized chamber group, and he is working on a piece in memory of Richard Pearl (the reporter beheaded in Afghanistan). At the conclusion of the conversation, Reich and Korot went to the control booth in the back of the auditorium, the white armchairs were cleared from the stage, and the audience was presented with the movie version of Three Tales. I won't review the piece here save to say that I love it, but some people don't. If you liked The Cave, but wished it had more going on, you might like it too. The reason I won't review the piece here is that you can find reviews of the piece elsewhere and the disappointing audience reaction is a more interesting story.

Note that this piece was after intermission, and as far as I could tell most if not all of the audience had returned after intermission. But after the first act and again after the second act a number of people (maybe 5 or 10 each time) got up and left the theatre. At the conclusion of Act III -- the best act, incidentally -- the applause was merely polite, and many people stood and started putting on their coats immediately. Reich and Korot started down the right hand aisle, but could tell that the applause was not going to last. They hesitated, and then Steve grabbed Beryl's arm, said something, and they both starting jogging down to the front. They only made it about 2/3 of the way down before the applause was done, and they gave it up and went back to the control booth. Now of course I'm disappointed that the audience didn't think Three Tales is the masterpiece I do, but I understand that different people like different things -- I've been known to call Eliot Carter "America's most overrated living composer" -- but I do expect the audience not to be rude. I've been to plenty of concerts where I thought the music was awful, pretentious, amateurish, self-important, etc, but I've never walked out or got up to leave before the applause was over, or stopped applauding as the composers made his way to the stage.

After the concert we completely failed to find a coffee shop in the vicinity of the museum that was open and had to wait until we got back uptown to the Columbia area, where we were staying.

posted by Galen H. Brown 4/05/2005