Steve Reich

Steve Reich has written for string quartet three times in sixty years, and all three pieces went to the same group. Kronos Quartet commissioned, premiered and recorded Different Trains, Triple Quartet and WTC 9/11, and their Nonesuch versions have stood unchallenged for decades. The Mivos Quartet are the first ensemble to put all three on one record, and they did it at Reich's invitation, working through the details with him over the course of the project.

Different Trains (1988) began with a fact of Reich's childhood. Between 1939 and 1942 he crossed the United States repeatedly by rail, shuttling between separated parents in New York and Los Angeles, accompanied by his governess. Years later it occurred to him that a Jewish boy in Europe in those same years would have been put on a different kind of train. The piece takes recorded speech from the governess, from a retired Pullman porter, and from three survivors of the camps, and builds its melodic lines out of the pitch contours of those voices. The strings do not accompany the speech. They double it.

Triple Quartet (1998) has no voices and no programme. One quartet plays against two prerecorded ones, and the interest lies in the rhythmic interference between the three layers and in the harmonic sourness Reich took from Bartók's Fourth Quartet. WTC 9/11 (2010) returns to the speech method with material Reich waited nearly a decade to touch: NORAD air traffic control tapes, fire department radio, neighbours who were on the street that morning. The last movement uses the voices of those who sat with the remains, a Jewish practice of watching over the dead. The first cover, a press photograph of the second plane, was withdrawn before release and replaced.

Mivos recorded at EMPAC in Troy, New York, across sessions in 2020 and 2022. Their reading is harder-edged than Kronos: shorter bows, sharper articulation, the speech samples remastered to bring consonants forward. Reviews divided along predictable lines. Sequenza21 heard a clarity that opens up textures Kronos leaves buried. Limelight thought the Kronos versions so bound up with the works that any successor sounds like a gloss. BBC Music Magazine found the new Different Trains jerkier and faster, judged WTC 9/11 less effective, and called the Triple Quartet the one to hear.

Reich turns ninety in October 2026, and the year has brought his catalogue back into circulation on a scale not seen since the eightieth. This is the only place to hear all three quartets in sequence, played by people who spent two years inside them.

2LP. Liner notes by John Schaefer.