Three months ago, Nonesuch brought out an updated version of its superbly comprehensive survey of Steve Reich’s collected works. The 27 discs included the first recordings of Reich’s most recent scores, Traveler’s Prayer and Jacob’s Ladder, and now, for those who already owned the set from its previous incarnation, it has released those two works together on their own. Both pieces were composed during the Covid lockdown, and are scored for four singers and an instrumental ensemble; in both cases, too, they have Hebrew texts taken from the Old Testament.
In almost every other respect, though, the two pieces are very different. Traveler’s Prayer, first performed in 2021, is meditative and static, floating, almost ritualised. Those who associate Reich’s music with insistent rhythmic movement will find little of that here, and Reich has described the result as “closer to Josquin des Prez than Stravinsky”. The long, sinuously intertwining vocal lines for the pairs of sopranos and tenors make constant use of canons, yet harmonically the music stays rooted to the spot, without the magical shifts of tonality that give so much of Reich’s music its allure.
Jacob’s Ladder, though, returns immediately to the propulsive, exuberant Reich, as the words from Genesis describing Jacob’s vision of a ladder to heaven are intoned by the vocalists over busy, insistent string and wind figures whose gently clashing dissonances add just a little edge to the textures. This buoyant music is joyously, inexhaustibly energetic; it’s hard to believe it was composed by a man who will be 90 next year.
Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
