Nonesuch

[bigjohnwayne]

Btw has anyone compared the two Steve Reich recordings Music For 18 Musicians on both labels. I have the ECM on vynil and the sound is very good so I never bothered to get the Nonesuch one.

Whoops--I'm replying 9 months late but here goes:

The Nonesuch recording has a lot more separation between the instruments. It actually feels like 18 musicians, rather than one throbbing, breathing mass of life, as the ECM does to me. I prefer the original because its so unusual and singular in that way.

Also, the Nonesuch version is longer, but I don't exactly know which parts are stretched out. Everything over 45 minutes and under an hour and fifteen minutes seems the same to me anyway.

I've been listening to some other renditions recently. The Ensemble Signal one is very good. Even more separation than the Nonesuch recording according to my memory.

The Grand Valley one is excellent as well.

I haven't heard the others, but there are very few. It wouldn't be very expensive to purchase every commercially available performance of the piece. It'd be an objet d'art to own 5 or 6 versions of such a minimal work of art, I suppose.

[alucard]

Whoops--I'm replying 9 months late but here goes:

The Nonesuch recording has a lot more separation between the instruments. It actually feels like 18 musicians, rather than one throbbing, breathing mass of life, as the ECM does to me. I prefer the original because its so unusual and singular in that way.

Also, the Nonesuch version is longer, but I don't exactly know which parts are stretched out. Everything over 45 minutes and under an hour and fifteen minutes seems the same to me anyway.

I've been listening to some other renditions recently. The Ensemble Signal one is very good. Even more separation than the Nonesuch recording according to my memory.

The Grand Valley one is excellent as well.

I haven't heard the others, but there are very few. It wouldn't be very expensive to purchase every commercially available performance of the piece. It'd be an objet d'art to own 5 or 6 versions of such a minimal work of art, I suppose.

Thanx for the interesting comment. btw my first recordings of Erik Satie were by the Dutch pianist Reinbert de Leeuw and he plays for example Les Gymnopedies extremly slow and when I heard later on Aldo Ciccolini I found his interpretation much too fast, but I learned to appreciate the Ciccolini versions and nowadays I prefer them to de Leeuw, IMO De Leeuw looses the inner tention of the music by spacing the notes out in such an extreme way.

[jkelman]

that's an interesting link between Nonesuch and ECM. Btw has anyone compared the two Steve Reich recordings Music For 18 Musicians on both labels. I have the ECM on vynil and the sound is very good so I never bothered to get the Nonesuch one.

They both sound great; what’s more worthy of comparison is the performances themselves, which are quite different (and the Nonesuch version is also considerably longer, demonstrating how fluid Reich’s work can be).