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Press quotes about You Are (Variations) CD
released on Nonesuch, September 2005

Westways Magazine, November/December 2005

“an absolute masterpiece”

Ivan Moody, Gramophone, November 2005

“The performance positively glitters; it seems quite clear that the Los Angeles Master Chorale under Grant Gershon is responding to the work’s intrinsic glow, the sense of spontaneity – the swing – in the music that Reich has rediscovered.”

New York Times, December 15, 2005

“All that was lacking, once again, was the Pulitzer Prize.”

Ivan Hewett, BBC Music Magazine, October 2005

“It is massively impressive.  The combination of the deliberately flat vocal sounds and the dancing rhythms has an atavistic quality, as if Reich were obeying the ancient Biblical injunction to ’praise God in song and dance. It’s a quality perfectly captured in this recording.”

Anastasia Tsioulcas, Billboard, September 25, 2005

“(The Los Angeles Master Chorale) performs with authoritative expertise.”

Marion Lignana Rosemberg, Newsday, December 25, 2005

“Reich’s You Are (Variations) stirs up a dizzying cloud of sound through which peek marimba and vibraphone splashes and gnomic texts on the nature of time and though.”

Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2005

“You Are (Variations) [is] a modern masterpiece by a composer with a downright Mozartean command of Minimalism.  He wrote the piece in 2004 for the Los Angeles Master Chorale, which has recorded it with Nonesuch.  It begins with a text by a Jewish mystic – ‘You are wherever your thoughts are’ – which, like this exciting music, cuts through the holiday season hooey like a knife through soft butter.”

Rob Cowan, The Independent (London), September 25, 2005

“In terms of its style, Steve Reich’s You Are (Variations) represents both recollection and rejuvenation.  Reich’s textual prompts were Wittgenstein and Jewish religious sources, his responses gritty, urgent, organic, wildly dancing — and strangely beautiful.  The forces called for – here, members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale under Grant Gershon – include voices, woodwinds, pianos and marimbas.  It’s the sort of music Reich does best, intimate yet outgoing, and surely his most compelling piece since Different Trains.”

Paris Transatlantic Magazine, February 2006

“brilliantly performed by (the) Los Angeles Master Chorale conducted by Grant Gershon”

Robert Levin, Amazon.com, November 3, 2005

“The resulting work is fascinating, the textures unique and fresh, the experience haunting and captivating, with the voices used as another significant instrumental part.”                       

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