Steve Reich: Double Sextet premiere and US tour
(March 2008)
Steve Reich’s latest work, Double Sextet, receives its premiere by the ensemble Eighth Blackbird on a US tour between March and May including concerts in San Francisco, Carnegie Hall in New York, Washington and Chicago. European performances follow including the UK premiere on 21 November as part of Liverpool’s European City of Culture festivities.View the full Performance Diary for Double Sextet.
The 22-minute work has two performing options, either as a live sextet of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano playing against a pre-recorded sextet on tape, or as an ensemble of 12 instrumentalists.
Steve Reich writes: “By doubling an entire chamber ensemble one creates the possibility for multiple simultaneous contrapuntal webs of identical instruments. In Different Trains and Triple Quartet all instruments are strings to produce one large string fabric. In Double Sextet there is more timbral variety through the interlocking of six different pairs of percussion, string and wind instruments.”
Steve Reich is the featured composer at Tokyo Opera City’s Composium (21-25 May) comprising concerts, a ‘conversation with the composer’, and the Takemitsu Composer’s Competition. Two programmes by Ensemble Modern and Synergy Vocals conducted by Bradley Lubman include Music for Eighteen Musicians and Proverb together with the Japanese premiere of Daniel Variations. Other national premieres of this recent work are in Turin (4 March) and Amsterdam (29 November) and the first recording is released by Nonesuch in April.
Reich’s success in the dance world continues with Wayne McGregor’s ballet to the Dolly movement from Three Tales travelling to San Francisco Ballet, and a Steve Reich Evening by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas company touring in Belgium, France, Italy, Austria and Germany through to June.
> Further information on Work: Double Sextet
Photo: Wonge Bergmann
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