Steve Reich concert is sheer delight

To plunge into that unmistakable Reichian landscape, with its shimmery instrumental textures and intricately interlocked rhythmic patterns, remains one of the great experiences the world of contemporary music has to offer.

[...] because Reich’s harmonic palette is similarly built from repeated cycles, you soon find yourself in a sort of Einsteinian musical world in which rhythm and harmony, melody and texture, are not distinct attributes but interrelated — even interchangeable — entities.

The concert was presented by the San Francisco Symphony, with Michael Tilson Thomas — who has been an ardent and impassioned champion of Reich’s music for more than 40 years — serving as the genial emcee.

“Different Trains,” Reich’s inventive and haunting memory piece about the Holocaust, got a vivid reading from the Kronos Quartet, but the performance was sabotaged by a loud and ugly sound mix that turned the work’s all-important tape recordings to murk — the evening’s one disappointment.

The doubling of the title can be achieved either live or on tape, and my first encounter with the live version persuaded me that there are far greater rewards to be had this way.

The evening was punctuated by a couple of brief celebratory film clips, including one in which Thomas and Reich reminisced about their 1973 concert in Carnegie Hall, which produced a clamor of outrage comparable to the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”

[...] there was a gorgeous and touching surprise addition to the program, as these two longtime collaborators took the stage to perform Reich’s simple yet fertile rhythmic etude, “Clapping Music.”