Steve Reich: Different Trains/Electric Counterpoint

What I love about Steve Reich is the way that he's continued to make rich compositions out of very simple but profoundly elegant ideas. Where Philip Glass and John Adams seem to have found that their early minimalist stylings were a cul-de-sac from which they had to reverse and follow more conventional routes, Reich stuck with the power of taking a few well-chosen and more or less 'found' melodies, and cooking up something special from these ingredients.

I think Different Trains was the first time he adapted melodies from the natural pitch and prosody of interview speech. That's where the musical ingredients come from. And overlaid on that is the personal/political concept of Reich's own cross-country train journeys as a young Jewish boy in 1940s America, compared with the train journeys Jews were taking in Germany at the time. Perhaps Reich doesn't quite pull off the cookery here as exquisitely as he has done elsewhere, or perhaps the Kronos Quartet's interpretation isn't from the top shelf (there have been a couple of more recent recordings, and I heard the most recent one is quite different, and good). But it's still pretty good. We saw Reich's The Cave last October, and that uses many similar techniques, as well as an ongoing concern with Jewish, and Arab, identity.

Having dished out all that praise, I have to say Electric Counterpoint doesn't add much to my appreciation of Reich. It seems like a re-hash of his other counterpoint pieces.

MusicBrainz entry for this album