The Minimalists

SOLI throws Steve Reich a ninetieth-birthday party at Trinity University, where SOLI has been the Ensemble in Residence since 2008. Students join the band, side by side, after a semester of coaching from its own players. The evening swings between the crowded and the solitary. Double Sextet, the piece that won Reich his Pulitzer, puts twelve people up there at once; in New York Counterpoint a single clarinet becomes eleven; and Clapping Music asks for many hands and good timing. John Adams and Philip Glass round out the family with Gabriella Smith, born nineteen years after Clapping Music into everything they made.