E-Mail This Article to a Friend Portraits A salute to Steve Reich at the Gardner, plus Russell Sherman’s birthday recital BY DAVID WEININGER

It’s been an open secret that the most interesting musical happenings in New York happen at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, a hotbed of new music and of fresh, original presentations of music from a wide array of eras and styles. That’s something every city can stand more of, so Boston is fortunate that the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has imported three entries of the Miller’s "Composer Portraits" series this season. The first two programs examined John Zorn, downtown gadfly supreme, and the forgotten Soviet composer Nikolai Roslavets. Next weekend, the Miller folks round out their northbound trips with a concert devoted to Steve Reich, as the group So Percussion tackle his mammoth 1971 work Drumming along with two smaller percussion-based works, Nagoya Marimbas and Music for Pieces of Wood.

It’s customary to file Reich under the minimalism tag, but the label is proving to be less and less useful these days. The steady pulse and gradually shifting rhythms are still there, but his best pieces are so complex, with so many compositional elements, that the label rings hollow. George Steel, Miller Theatre’s director and the host of the "Composer Portraits" series, agrees. "It’s a useful term, because people sort of know you mean Steve Reich or people following Steve," he says over the phone from his office. "But is there a minimal amount of material? No, they’re very rich pieces." Perhaps a better label would be Steve Reich, The Artist Formerly Known As a Minimalist.

What’s also happened over the near-40 years of Reich’s composing career is that he and composers of his sort have gone from radical upstarts to canonized heavyweights. His most important works — Steel lists Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, and the Triple Quartet among his favorites — did what all great music has done: they altered the course of what came after it. That’s something Steel says a younger generation of musicians can show us in the performance of Reich’s music. "It’s really about hearing Drumming performed in a new way," he says of the concert. "It’s being performed by So Percussion, this group who grew up listening to this music. When they were kids, these things were classics. These are young guys, and it’s their native tongue. It’s as natural as breathing for them to play this music. They eat this stuff for breakfast."

Because Reich had little interest in the usual ensembles on which classical music is based, he formed his own ensemble (Steve Reich and Musicians) to play and record his music. Those performances are the vehicle by which most of us know his music, but Steel argues that there’s a lot to learn from hearing the view that a group like So, who’ve just recorded the work on the Cantaloupe label, can bring to it. "It’s a much more aggressive performance than the old one. You hear a completely different energy. They’re much more able to bring out the color of the instruments." Although Drumming is scored for an imaginative combination of bongos, marimbas, glockenspiels, and voices, we don’t usually think of Reich as a colorist. But hearing the piece in a vital, energetic performance, Steel argues, "you realize that the way that Steve was able to illustrate the phases and rhythms of his music is through instrumental color. One of the things that people never think about him is that he’s a master orchestrator. Think of a piece like Music for 18 Musicians, which is full of sounds you’ve never heard before."

Another advantage of a live performance, Steel points out, is the spatial element that’s so crucial to Reich and that’s missing in recordings. "There’s a visual side to Steve’s music that just cannot come through on compact disc. Seeing these guys do it, watching the sticks, seeing them move around in a quasi-balletic choreography where the guys trade spaces, two guys play on the same instrument — that illustrates the structure of the music in a way that listening just can’t. Seeing a piece like this is what it’s all about — you can’t believe that it’s possible. You hear it on record and you think, well, anything’s possible on record. But to see it live is really quite eye-opening."

So can Steel sum up the arc of Reich’s composing career, where he’s come from his earliest works? In a word, no. "There’s no point in summarizing a composer’s career until it’s over, and Steve’s is far from over. The guy is going from strength to strength. It’s clearly the same voice, the same obsessive focus on construction. It’s such beautifully, carefully made music."

The Miller Theatre presents its Steve Reich "Composer Portrait" March 26 at 7 p.m. (with a reception to follow) and March 27 at 1:30 p.m. at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 the Fenway. Tickets are $20 and include museum admission; call (617) 278-5156.

SHERMAN SPEAKS. Pianist Russell Sherman is, among other things, a fountain of great quotes, both his own and others’. One of his favorites comes from the great Viennese satirist Karl Kraus: "If there were no stock phrases in the world, there would be no need for weapons." That’s enough to make a writer hesitate before falling back on his next cliché or making another tired comparison between a human being and his art.

Still, it’s difficult to avoid the impression that the same qualities that make Sherman’s playing so transfixing are evident in conversation — the same imaginative expression, an unexpected linking of ideas, one to the other. When I ask him about his upcoming 75th-birthday recital next week, he shies away from the idea of celebration, citing another of his artistic heroes. "Cézanne said that every day he would get up, look at his mountain, and do his studies. His greatest pleasure was to study, to explore, and if great art came about, it was something of a by-product." Sherman has approached his 60-year career of public musicmaking the same way. "There’s nothing I enjoy more than practicing," he says. "The rest is just the cream on top."

He’s not planning on ceasing his explorations either. His next big project will be playing all of Mozart’s sonatas, beginning in 2006, the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Early indications of the results can be gleaned from his recent recordings of the D-minor and C-minor piano concertos with Emmanuel Music, along with fantasias in the same key (on Emmanuel’s own label). There one hears performances with an extra measure of freedom that don’t sacrifice emotional intensity for poise and classical restraint. "Freedom and discipline are not mutually exclusive," he says. Mozart’s music may be elegant and lyrical on the surface, but lurking underneath is what Sherman calls "the hairy ape," the darker emotional forces often hidden from view. "This retinue of ghosts and devils is part of Mozart. You can’t just make it into a lullaby." The whole point of art, he continues, "is to bring together these false dichotomies." He’s reminded of Cézanne again: "When the colors are perfected, the form is finished."

Humility and imagination mark everything he does. In fact, the uniting of opposites could be taken as a cipher for Sherman’s entire career. But such grand retrospective pronouncements don’t suit an artist who simply relishes the work of music for its own sake. And he’s reminded of the words of one more towering historical figure: "As the great Satchel Paige said, ‘Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.’ "

Russell Sherman plays a 75th-birthday recital of music by Beethoven, Debussy, Bartók, and Liszt on March 28 at 8 p.m. at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street in Boston. The concert is free; call (617) 585-1122.