Steve Reich’s Double Sextet/2x5 lofty and alive with the mechanics of wonder.

Challenging, adventurous and minimal tend to not follow each other in any given sentence, but they sure describe Steve Reich’s musical library. The New York City composer of such extraordinary sonic feats as Piano Phase and Music for 18 Musicians has finally recorded his 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece Double Sextet alongside the recent 2x5, released Tuesday on Nonesuch records.

Double Sextet is a mutating harmonic power drive that shifts through the composer’s famed polyrhythms with extreme prejudice. Scored for doubled up piano, vibraphone, cello, violin, flute and clarinet, classical ensemble eight blackbird ( who also commissioned the piece) stepped up to the challenge of executing the demanding phrases for the instruments and their doppelgängers.

This tightrope balancing act performs as a Swiss watch, showing its gears throughout as well as polishing its adornments. The foundation chords of the piece are constantly heard throughout its clockwork, but the pianos’ melodic repetition highlights the nuances of the other instruments, drawing attention to the color of clarinet blows and violin attacks that breathe life into its mechanics. The composition transforms the daring percussion phrases into harmonic meditations, opening the listener to the reality of the piece and its seemingly hidden complexity. Like a new revelation, the sonata-form breakdown of its movements (divided in: I. Fast, II. Slow and III. Fast) showcase the push-pull system of its dynamics, evolving with its myriad of interlocking keys and string. The operating repertoire is alive with the beauty of the being at the moment, climbing towards loftier ground while growing with the colors of its reality.

There is also a cosmic feel to the ethos of the work. Instruments part from their germinating origin and proceed to motor in their own harmonic systems but eventually synch up in the wider scope of the larger mechanics, as though by some slow hand or the winds and woods themselves.

Reich also ventures into exercising his rock idiom in, 2x5, commissioned and preformed by contemporary classical group Bang on a Can. Separating itself from the rhythmic complexity of the first part of the record, Reich explores classical compositions in the rock n’ roll context. Scored for a double set of two guitars, bass, drums and piano, the piece combines the intricacy of Reich’s harmonic endeavors and the aural ambiance of rock.

Though the electrified tonalities of the instruments should provide a Spector-like wall of sound, the piece does not sound as thick, or melodically dense, as its also-doubled-up counterpart.  Interesting at its best, the piece might have listeners bobbing to one of its many rhythms but it's still cast among the shadows of its predecessor.

The elder musical statesman continues to push the aural boundaries of music, branching towards new ground with his rock voicings but still reshaping the tonal nodes of modern classical with vibrant pulses and his unique musical language. Minimalist/post-minimalist/totalist or whatever you fancy, Reich is at the top of his game, Double Sextet is definitely one of the composer’s most achieving, demanding and intrepid pieces. Enigmatic, beautiful, and at times wondrous, Double Sextet/ 2x5 is an aural whirlwind, imperial in its own right and majestic in its rhythmic execution.