Steve Reich: Octet; Music for a Large Ensemble; Violin Phase

Steve Reich's commercial success had ballooned after his prior release on ECM, Music for 18 Musicians, and this collection of three compositions, two new and one from 1967, was the follow-up. Music for a Large Ensemble is very much of a piece with the prior work, using extended melodic lines, a larger palette of sound colors, and key changes every several minutes. It's charming and pleasantly busy in an industrious way but really covers little new ground. The remaining two pieces are where the real meat lies. Violin Phase was written early in the composer's career, when he was just working through the core ideas of his brand of minimalism alongside similar "phase" works for piano and electric organ. Scored for solo violin and played by the brilliant Shem Guibbory, the violinist plays against tapes of himself, beginning in strict unison but gradually speeding up or slowing down, generating one fascinatingly unexpected pattern after another. The intellectual rigor and breathtaking purity