by Ben Hogwood Image unknown credit, used courtesy of Wikipedia
On this day 150 years ago, the first performance of Brahms’s Third String Quartet took place in Berlin.
It is the lesser known of the three published Brahms quartets, but has a certain Autumnal beauty and lightness ideal for this time of year.
It was dedicated to cellist Professor Theodor Wilhelm Engelmann, and published just before his Symphony no.1. You can enjoy a performance of the quartet below, given by the Castalian Quartet at the Wigmore Hall in 2020:
Earlier this week we learned of the sad news that leading pianist Stephen Kovacevich had passed away at the age of 86.
A truly great pianist, Kovacevich was in later years an insightful conductor too. I was very fortunate to meet him at his house back in 2015, where he gave an interview full of insight, humour and generous detail. His generosity and geniality shone through at that meeting, but so did a fierce creative intensity running through his finest recordings.
posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the press release, Photo by Edward Bishop
Blue Reservoir is the eleventh and latest studio album from Everything But The Girl (above) – the best-selling UK duo formed in 1982 by singer-writer-musicians Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, out on February 19 on Buzzin’ Fly/Virgin.
The album’s first single Young and Dumb and accompanying music video is out now, and more UK live dates in May 2027 go on sale this Friday 30 October.
My thoughts are that Young and Dumb is very much a return to past glories as the song ambles into view, with a languid Spanish guitar anticipating Tracey’s vocal. Her voice has deepened (“yes I’m older and wiser”, she sings) and remains as expressive as ever, dovetailing beautifully with Ben’s backing. “So let’s drink to the future”, they sing together, “let’s drink to just living like we’re young and dumb again”.
I think we can all resonate with that.
Meanwhile, a bit about Blue Reservoir from the album PR:
“Inspired by the pair’s unexpected and unconventional return to live performance in 2025 – a long-running sold-out residency (with thousands each night on the wait list) at Hackney’s intimate 300-capacity MOTH Club – Blue Reservoir sees the duo put aside the sharply-lit electronica of 2023’s acclaimed comeback album, Fuse, and lean into some of their foundational influences and ideas.
“There was an intensity and simplicity to the MOTH shows that took us back to how we started out,” says Thorn. “Direct, rooted in guitar and voice, a few extra colours. We hadn’t been in that world for a long time and it just felt fresh and real.”
Uplifted, Watt bought a Spanish nylon-string guitar in January 2026 to write and perform on: “It is the sound of so much of the music I first connected with growing up, and I’d never actually owned one. It became quite an emotional springboard for me. I found a voice I thought I’d lost.”
Published post no.3,061 – Wednesday 28 October 2026
Described as balancing ‘raw sonic exploration with a strong sense of atmosphere’, Dmitry Polivenko delivers his first solo work as Vigilant for Glacial Movements.
Taking up the story, he describes the album as “an exploration of memory, nostalgia, and the passage of time. It reflects a feeling that returns to me every year—a yearning for a fleeting moment of happiness preserved deep within my childhood. Winter, with its silence and wonder, remains one of my earliest memories: sitting wrapped in a blanket on a sled, carried through snow-covered streets by my father. Today, I walk those same streets alone, guided by fragments of the past. Time can feel like a storm that clouds our vision and pulls us away from ourselves. Yet beneath the weight of accumulated experiences, expectations, and endless information, there remains a quiet certainty: beyond the noise, beyond the dreams and fears, lies the possibility of rediscovering who we truly are. This album is a journey through that landscape of remembrance and self-discovery.”
What’s the music like?
As evocative as the cover art. This music is deep as the ocean but weather-beaten too, its elemental power immediately obvious as the slowly shifting harmonies evolve with the slow tread of a ship or an iceberg.
Winter has his house is as cold as you would expect, though some of the more consonant harmonies raise the temperature a little. By contrast Lullaby is not so restful, with a searching treble line.
There is an icy, industrial air to the likes of Cold silent love but a contrasting charm to the quieter Crystals, which operates above a soft, sonorous drone amid footsteps in the snow. Here Polivenko appears to be channelling childhood memories of being pulled through icy streets on a sled by his father.
Into the black light is shifty and twisted, a fever dream in the snow, resolved by the bright consonance of Somewhere, whose sweeping beauty looks skyward.
Does it all work?
It does, and with its quieter central core the album is ideally structured.
Is it recommended?
Yes. Vigilant writes powerfully from the heart, and the remembered threads of the title combine here to make a substantial and lasting piece of work.
For fans of…Loscil, Tim Hecker, Schneider TM, O Yuki Conjugate
After Come Out was over, I remember thinking, “What is this? Am I gonna be a mad scientist trapped in a loft with a tape recorder? So, I immediately thought, “I’ve got to return to live music.” – Steve Reich, talking to Michael Tilson Thomas (from Steve Reich: Conversations)
Background
Having vowed to return to live music, Reich encountered difficulties. “Unfortunately, it seemed to me at the time impossible for two human beings to perform that gradual phase shifting process, since the process was discovered with, and was indigenous to, machines.”, he says in Writings on Music.
Yet he was in for a welcome surprise, realising that having recorded a short loop on the piano, he could indeed play against it as though he were a second tape recorder. “Doing it is really incredible”, he recounted to MTT, “because the only way I can do it is to close my eyes and listen as closely as possible so that I don’t move two sixteenths ahead, or just get stuck in unison.”
The rhythmic interval of a sixteenth is critical, for while the two musicians begin in unison, the second starts to gradually increase their tempo so that the phase shifting begins, and eventually they move one beat (one sixteenth) ahead. This continues until both align back in unison, at which point a new melodic pattern is introduced, and the shifts begin from scratch. The home key is B minor, and the piano notes are largely mid-range.
Listen
Thoughts
Piano Phase is one of Reich’s most hypnotic works, and once again it rewards the active listener with a dazzling array of riffs that can be picked out of the crowded textures seemingly at will. The shifts of rhythmic emphasis are thrilling, and as the second pianist moves ahead of the first there are moments of euphoria when torrents of notes are unleashed like a waterfall, then reassuring blocks where everything falls metrically into line.
There are dancing figurations created by the constant movements, the left hand acting as the ‘legs’ to support the movement in the right hand’s ‘upper body’ figurations. These shapes constantly shift in the listener’s imagination.
Halfway through, when you might expect the piece to drag, it regenerates, fresh energy added as the rhythms bounce off each other, while fifteen minutes in and what seemed to be a simple, single line is now a dazzling wall to well ringing of bells, with very little bass
By the end the melodic elements are almost done, bouncing between two notes a tone apart and seemingly trapped in a vacuum. This feels like exactly the right point for the piece to stop, which it does in unison. As always, the quiet at the end of a minimalist piece feels like the loudest part of all, until things subside to silence – yet the effect lingers, the musical equivalent of a double espresso.
Quotes / Legacy
“It’s one pattern, but it’s a completely different way of playing the piano…it requires a completely different skill set. You’re playing the piano like a percussionist. You were asking the performers to do something that up until that point people had not been asking performers to do.” – composer Michael Gordon on discovering Piano Phase (from Steve Reich: Conversations)
Is it too fanciful to suggest modern pop songs such as Alex Warren’s Fever Dream have been indirectly influenced by Reich’s workings?
Recordings
There are several. Reich’s first recording, made with Double Edge (pianists Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles, clocks in at just over 20 minutes. Ensemble Avantgarde on Wergo are 18’40”, while Vincent Corver and Keith Ford are a nippy 13’40” with their account for CPO. All are enjoyable, but Reich’s is more authoritative. You can compare on this Tidal playlist
Also written / released in 1967 The BeatlesSgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; The Jimi Hendrix ExperienceAre You Experienced; ShostakovichSeven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok; StockhausenHymnen
