The Compact Collection  

Steve Reich's latest reaffirms a potent creative force that won't be swayed from its path. Reich today is the same Reich we've known for years, a single-minded minimalist who only writes what he means. The Triple Quartet of 1999 has the Kronos Quartet grappling with their pre-recorded selves for a harmonically tart essay in three parts. The first has grim, interlocking chords crossed by melodies in canon; the second is a contrapuntal, Eastern-sounding E minor and the fast finale closes in that key. There is no compromise, no wastage.

Electric Guitar Phase grew last year from the rhythmically obsessive Violin Phase that Reich had composed in 1967. The new piece was transposed and coloured by guitarist Dominic Frasca, who takes the shifting repetitions of the original and breaks them down into different types of sound: rock-style gagging, percussive clattering, mellow single notes and, towards the end, a prominently pulsing baritone line. Each time you listen, your ear attends to a fresh musical line. It's a stimulating and in many ways uplifting way to spend a quarter of an hour.

Music for Large Ensemble (1978) has slept soundly, or has seemed to, since its premiere ECM recording. But this new version, by Alarm Will Sound and Ossia (from the Eastman Music School) under Alan Pierson, is the best Reich performance by a non-Reich ensemble I have ever heard, except perhaps Ensemble Modern's Music for 18 Musicians (RCA). Again, the piece has been re-jigged, this time with extra violins and an optional sax. It's a bit like a condensed take on 18 Musicians, with mellow-tuned percussion, chiming signals (they tip you off whenever patterns are about to change) and constant mobility. The main difference is that in Large Ensemble, crescendoing brass chords become shooting stars flying across the musical mainland to some unnamed destination.

Tokyo/Vermont Counterpoint is different again, a 1981 flute ensemble piece (Vermont) transferred to electronic marimba and xylophone samples (Tokyo) by Mika Yoshida. It's tighter, brighter and tougher on sticks than on flutes and, as Reich himself writes, "it clearly has a sense of humour".

Anyone approaching Harrison Birtwistle's Pulse Shadows with the notion that the most unswayable of Modernists is at last riding the minimalist bandwagon is in for a shock. Birtwistle's prompt was the Romanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan, whose often cryptic but strangely beautiful verses alternate with prism-like single movements for string quartet. The text settings, all of which test the idea of reflection beyond the realm of words, employ a small ensemble but Celan's most famous poem – "Todesfuge", or "Death Fugue" – is entrusted to the string quartet as the last of four "Friezes". It's angry music that never betrays the integrity of thought. But perhaps the most ingenious movement is "Todtnauberg", where soprano Claron McFadden alternates a spoken text in English with a sung German text (performances in German can reverse the process). In "Tenebrae" Birtwistle's music drains blood from a poem where "our eyes and our mouths are so open and empty" and where the word "Lord" has an ominously hollow ring. The possibility of reordering the sequence means that new shades of meaning, even new works, are always on the cards. The performance could hardly be more convincing.

Reich: Triple Quartet/'Electric Guitar Phase'/'Music for Large Ensemble'/ 'Tokyo/Vermont Counterpoint' – Kronos Quartet, Dominic Frasca, Mika Yoshida (Nonesuch 7559-79546-2)

Birtwistle: 'Pulse Shadows' – Claron McFadden, Arditti Quartet, Nash Ensemble/Reinbert de Leeuw (Teldec 3984-26867-2)