Word: tehillim
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...Reich: Tehillim (ECM/ Warner Bros.). In the year of minimalism, Steve Reich's hypnotic psalms are a modern...
...when the New York Philharmonic opens its subscription season this week under Conductor Zubin Mehta, it does so with an eagerly sound. Reich orchestral premiere: Tehillim, an infectious, high-spirited laudation set to Hebrew psalms, which begins with the sound of two hands clapping and ends in a full-throated blaze of hallelujahs. For both Reich and the style of which he is a leading representative, the concert will be a cause of celebration. Minimalism, a joyous, exciting-and sometimes maddening-amalgam of influences as disparate as African drumming, the Balinese gamelan and new wave rock, has come uptown...
...Four Organs performance at Carnegie Hall, has reservations. "Minimalism still has a lot to come to terms with," he says. "Will it show us dichotomies of human nature and thought that have made good classical music fascinating through the years?" Conductor Mehta, despite his championing of Reich's Tehillim, also sees some limitations. "After all," Mehta says, drawing an analogy to painting, "Seurat and his points didn't go on too long. I don't think it could last...
Reich's Tehillim should also find popular favor. The most formally conventional piece Reich has yet written, Tehillim (the name means psalms or praises in Hebrew) is in four movements and reflects its composer's interest in cantillation, or chanting of the Scriptures. The music has a strong Middle Eastern flavor with its crisp, jagged rhythms and exotic melodic turns, which compound and pile up on one another until the piece explodes in an irresistible shout of triumph. In Tehillim Reich has added an ecstatic element to his musical vocabulary, and his work has become more poignant...
...dark trousers, there is a deep warmth in his best works: Music for 18 Musicians (1976), one of Reich's longest (nearly an hour) and texturally richest pieces, infused with an uncharacteristic sense of brooding and menace; the Octet (1979), a sunny minimalist ode to joy; and Tehillim...
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