Reich Phase. A chamber music event at Hanzas perons

His greatness is a fact. His reputation as a pillar of contemporary art music is carved in stone. The mark he has left on others and on the world is immense, even if at first glance we do not feel it as a finger poked in the eye. Steve Reich's admirers and disciples are found among listeners and among other artists — in jazz, in popular and electronic music, even in hip-hop. Many do not merely think so; they conclude it. Among them the well-known critic Alex Ross, who finds himself pleasantly helpless in a life for which the Master has written the soundtrack, because his presence keeps surfacing around us — in TV commercials, in cinema, in nightclubs… After all, it is thanks to Steve Reich that we have come to hear the man-made, industrialised world and its sounds, the sound of a moving train among them, as music. This autumn he celebrates a milestone birthday. To mark it, and as a greeting to the composer, his "phase" sets in at Perons.

On both evenings, those present at "Reich Phase" will have the chance to experience chamber works that are less well known in our part of the world yet significant in the composer's output, drawn from different periods of his career. Violinist Marta Spārniņa performs "Violin Phase" (1967) — one of Steve Reich's early works for solo violin and tape, which almost 60 years later stands as the most vivid testimony of the composer's "phasing period". The Perons Quartet — Konstantīns Paturskis (violin), Aleksejs Bahirs (violin), Pēteris Trasuns (viola) and Dace Zālīte-Zilberte (cello) — give the Latvian premiere of the composer's tribute to the victims of the 11 September attacks, the string quartet "WTC 9/11" (2010). With Normunds Šnē at the conductor's stand, musicians of Sinfonietta Rīga and Perons Percussion, together with pianists Rihards Plešanovs and Evelīna Jēkabsone and a vocal quartet led by Viktorija Majore, perform the monumental "Tehillim" (1981).

Steve Reich can be called many things and understood in many ways. A minimalist, a genius, a living classic; a sharp-eyed, demanding composer who is perhaps at times impatient with his own listener. But this birthday greeting — "Reich Phase" — is inspired by the composer as a creator of unexpected and fundamentally new circumstances. Just as Steve Reich does not write into the score what is heard and experienced in his music, leaving it to the attention of each listener, so the ebb after the first weekend of October promises to reveal several possible situations: the feeling of a composer's birthday marked, of musical premieres lived through, or of waking into a world with changed rules — with the foundations just laid for tomorrow's castles in the air, or among the ruins of buildings of illusion.