American music often receives more sympathetic performances in Europe than it does at home, but until recently, that has not been true of the music of the minimalist school of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and their associates. However, consider this group of Reich works, performed by the Holst-Sinfonietta of Freiburg, Germany. It's all one can ask, with multiple attractions. One is the chronological presentation of Reich's works, which developed in several new directions over the first decades of his career (Glass' major ...
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American music often receives more sympathetic performances in Europe than it does at home, but until recently, that has not been true of the music of the minimalist school of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and their associates. However, consider this group of Reich works, performed by the Holst-Sinfonietta of Freiburg, Germany. It's all one can ask, with multiple attractions. One is the chronological presentation of Reich's works, which developed in several new directions over the first decades of his career (Glass' major shifts came later in his life). Listeners new to Reich, and there are many in Europe, will hear his music develop out of a jazz-influenced kernel to encompass classic minimalism, phase shifts, and the magisterial City Life, which brought together several strands of his music up to the early 1990s, with samples of city sounds and a breaking of the pulse by independent chamber groupings. A major attraction here is the presence of a rarely recorded early Reich work, Music for Two or More...
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