The work recorded here had a long and interesting genesis as composer
Steve Reich and visual artist
Gerhard Richter discussed an evolving digital work of
Richter's over some years, as it turned into a film by director Corinna Belz.
Reich had worked several times before with visual artists and filmmakers, and art galleries were an important home for minimalist music in general, but Reich/Richter marks a new development. The
Richter work, as shown in the film, begins with a series of horizontal stripes (depicted in the album graphics here), which are subdivided by factors of two down to the pixel level and then slowly return to stripes.
Reich's music depicts this process, which is hardly alien to the general conception of his music, but what is interesting is that the music is not an exact mirror.
Reich's work is four movements, and the two central ones, "Patterns & scales" and "Cross fades," seem to step out of
Richter's progression. This work has been widely performed even by
Reich's standards; it ran for some months at The Shed in New York and has been realized at various European venues, always with the film except for the current instance.
Reich insists that it can also serve as a concert work. Listeners will have to decide for themselves about this, but the live performance here by the
Ensemble Intercontemporain (a group that once upon a time would have had little to do with
Reich) is sharp, and the Salle Boulez at the Philharmonie de Paris serves the work well acoustically. This is, at the very least, a testimony to
Reich's continuing vitality as a composer and to his audience appeal; the album hit classical best-seller charts in the summer of 2022. ~ James Manheim