Mivos Quartet/Steve Reich - The String Quartets



[Several hours hours after it arrived on my porch]

Oh so good. Ok, i could do my normal silly things, and i could bore you to boredom with the back story of Steve Reich and this official "director's cut" of his 3 string quartets, but i think i'd rather just say a few things about the actual object in my hand and ears.

I can't help you much in the liking Steve Reich's music department, other than to say i adore it. I don't like that it's 45 RPM because buttons and forgetting to press them before and after and stuff, and the juxtaposition of old speech recordings that have a ridiculously high noise floor with current hifi dead silent multitracking in a multi-million dollar treated space is a coin flip, but Mivos sounds absolutely gorgeous and the playing is phenomenal.

As the only comprehensive recording (because he wrote them all a decade plus apart from each other) i very much like that they are presented in reverse chronological order, and i also very much like the fact that you can actually listen to each quartet separately. 9/11 WTC and Triple Quartet get their own sides, and Different Trains gets the whole second record. This is a masterclass of creating an anthology on vinyl in its own right.

Yeah, i preordered my copy like 2 months ago, but i can't imagine Deutche Grammaphone balked at producing enough copies to satisfy anybody who might possibly want one. Go find it, i'd consider it a worthwhile acquisition. 

Plus it's not Kronos. Not that Kronos isn't awesome for making these pieces exist at all in the first place, but they shouldn't be the only option when it comes to listening to them, you know?

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