NEW YORK — Who would have thought to describe Steve Reich as a melodist? Surely not the listeners at his Carnegie Hall debut 53 years ago, when enraged audience members rushed the stage during a performance of his Four Organs, a piece with no melody and little rhythm, only layers of tectonically shifting harmonic drones.
Fast forward a half-century. The audience that heard his music performed on the same stage Oct. 22 for his 90th birthday celebration left with a radically different impression of the importance of melody to Reich’s art.
The truth is that the success of even some of his earliest pieces is owed to the quality of their tunes as well as their formal sophistication. While Piano Phase and Violin Phase both use the most elementary melodic cells conceivable, put through largely the same processes, Piano Phase manages to be a more pleasurable piece to listen to than Violin Phase simply because — as Reich himself would be the first to admit — Piano Phase is built out of a better riff.
Bryce Dessner, the composer-performer who opened the birthday performance, knows from riffs. Best known as the guitarist in the rock band The National, he has a deep background in classical music and has built a fruitful second career as a composer whose early works made clear his admiration, and study, of Reich’s music.
Here he played Reich’s Electric Counterpoint for live and prerecorded electric guitars, originally written for jazz hero Pat Metheny. But while Metheny’s benchmark recording gives off the flashes of color that characterize his sound, Dessner’s approach favored a lean and focused sonority that underlined the work’s kinship to Afropop in its boppier sections and, in its wistful middle section (where the merest hint of vibrato warmed the sound just one degree), lent the work unexpected, affective power.
There’s always the danger in Reich’s music for soloist versus tape that the audience will lose aural track of which lines of imitative counterpoint are live and which are recorded — and then, what’s the point of a live performance? — but a mix that subtly favored the live Dessner gave the human performer center stage.
Two Pianos, a U.S. premiere and — following Piano Phase and Six Pianos (revised as Piano Counterpoint) — only Reich’s third acknowledged work for pianos alone, found the composer in a more expressionistic mode, the keyboardists exchanging dramatic, slowly changing dissonances, syncopated obscurely between the two instruments.
No wonder soloists Lisa Kaplan and Nico Muhly were locked, like the gears of a single clockwork mechanism, into perfect rhythmic sync: Kaplan has spent much of her career, as the pianist in Eighth Blackbird, championing this repertoire, while Muhly’s own compositions have mined the Stravinskian voicings and jagged rhythms of Reich’s piano writing for everything they’re worth.
The piece left one wanting more in every sense. In order to maintain rhythmic clarity in a Reich score, it always seems necessary to keep the underlying pulse at a constant andante, never quite fast enough for frenzy or slow enough for pomp. But the piece was also all too brief: What a thrill it would be to hear another large-scale keyboard work from Reich at this point in his career!
Double Sextet, a work originally composed with Kaplan in mind, immediately followed, and while David Friend (of Ensemble Signal) and Vicky Chow (of the Bang on a Can All-Stars) took keyboard duties this time around, they managed to match Kaplan’s premiere interpretations for brawn in the outer movement’s relentless, exhilarating piano grooves.
The dissonances that help make this one of Reich’s most powerful scores also, as became obvious from a few unfortunate violin notes, render it one of his most difficult to play in tune, but the imitative interplay between the antiphonal sextets were musically — and emotionally and dramatically — sensible. The two ensembles felt like more than abstract instrumental groupings: They were two voices engaged in a vigorous philosophical dialogue.
Under conductor Brad Lubman, a definitive Reich interpreter, the players hit their articulations hard. Reich has written pieces explicitly inspired by his favorite rock music — he is a fan of Radiohead as well as The National — but none have rocked quite like Double Sextet, whose deeply satisfying cadences lend its finale symphonic heft.
Reich has spoken with some chagrin of his earlier orchestral works, in which he simply attempts to apply the principles of his chamber music on a large scale. They are not without charm, but his skepticism is warranted: Nothing in these works comes close to Double Sextet or Music for 18 Musicians. Surprisingly, in the next piece on the program — Jacob’s Ladder (2023) for four singers and ensemble — he seems to have done the opposite, wrangling the instruments of a chamber orchestra into dialogues and doublings that hint at orchestrations on a larger scale. Almost as unexpected is the work’s melodic generosity, with ascending and descending pentatonic lines that evince an almost Coplandesque lyricism.
In All Your Ways, a U.S. premiere and the night’s finale, extended these tendencies further still, with a score so tuneful and dynamic — constantly shifting harmonically and rhythmically — that one fears Reich is in danger of writing normal music. When the piece’s nonstop melody suddenly took on an almost sentimental quality, it was impossible to be unmoved not only by its sheer loveliness but also by the sound of a composer finding a new facet to his style at the age of 90.
There were no riots during this concert, unless one counts the riotous applause that greeted Reich’s curtain call. It was a relief to see him looking so well, though now walking with a cane, which he raised like a sword in response to the audience’s roars of adulation — as the evening offered his fans hope for a truly golden late period. One of the most important and stimulating classical musicians of the 20th century has, in the 21st, given full rein to his melodic instincts, with triumphant results.
