Steve Reich

Featuring: Ensemble Intercontemporain, George Jackson

Reich/Richter is one of those late works that quietly redraws the map of Steve Reich’s own language. Written in 2018 for Ensemble Intercontemporain and premiered with Gerhard Richter and Corinna Belz’s film Moving Picture (946‑3), the piece takes the painter’s algorithmic procedure - dividing, mirroring, and recombining an abstract canvas into ever-finer stripes - and translates its underlying logic into sound. Rather than a literal soundtrack, the score is a parallel construction: a 37‑minute span for fourteen players (winds, string quartet, two pianos, two vibraphones) that can be experienced with or without the film, built around the same fascination with how simple units, repeated and transformed, generate complex, shifting fields.

The recording by Ensemble Intercontemporain under George Jackson, released on Nonesuch in 2022 for Reich’s 85th‑birthday season, presents the work in four continuously played sections labelled Opening, Patterns & Scales, Crossfades and Closing on disc, descriptive markers rather than separate movements. The music begins with two oscillating piano chords establishing a steady pulse, quickly joined by clarinets, flutes, vibraphones, and strings that thicken the harmony into what one reviewer called “gradually permuting sonic cloudscapes.” As in the film’s pixel logic, small modules are iterated and reframed: scale‑wise lines unfurl over the pulse, canons blossom between winds and strings, and sustained tones hover above the motoric keyboards, creating a gentle ambiguity in pacing that recalls the layered time-feel of Octet and Music for 18 Musicians.​

Midway, the piece undergoes a marked deceleration. As the film’s images move from ultra‑fine stripes back toward larger, creature‑like forms, Reich stretches his note values: the incessant sixteenth‑note grid eases into long, glowing lines, a “mesmeric sequence of elongated instrumental phrases shimmering like aurora across sonic night skies,” before the faster oscillations gradually reassert themselves. The overall design is a single arch, returning at the end to the opening material “as if arriving back where it all began thirty‑seven minutes earlier,” a structural rhyme with Richter’s progression from painting to stripes and back. Harmonic language, while recognisably Reichian, is darker and more chromatic than his early work, giving the textures a richer, more iridescent hue.​

Critics have treated this recording as a benchmark. Reviews highlight the ensemble’s “astonishing clarity and balance,” noting how each canonic strand remains audible even as the surface glows with dense crossfades of timbre. Jackson’s conducting is praised as “rhythmically incisive and expressive,” keeping the ground pulse buoyant while allowing the longer lines to breathe and crest naturally. The result is a performance that underscores the piece’s dual identity: on one level, a rigorously constructed process work in dialogue with a major visual artist; on another, a standalone, ravishing score that grips the listener from the first oscillating chords to the final fading resonance.​