Two birthdays were celebrated at Southbank Centre’s Steve Reich-fest. First, the composer himself, a supremely influential artist who has shifted the classical music dial over decades with his evolving yet instantly recognisable soundworld. He turns 90 on 3 October.
And then there was Music for 18 Musicians, one of his signature works, which notches up a half-century this year. An immersive performance of the latter invited the audience to mingle with an ensemble dotted around the Clore Ballroom, the collective grins on faces proof positive of the work’s enduring power to raise the spirits. Doing the honours was Paraorchestra, Charles Hazlewood’s enterprising collective of disabled and non-disabled musicians, who brought Reich’s kaleidoscopic music to life with ironclad discipline.
Freed from fixed seats, the itinerant audience peered at musicians on podiums as if they were objects in an exhibition, marvelling at the precision of polyrhythmic marimba players, or grooving in a central mosh pit with a flexuous quintet of dancers who persuaded children and grandparents alike to go with the flow. Line dancing, disco lights – this exhilarating performance had it all. Twenty minutes to catch the breath and it was upstairs to the Festival Hall for the London Sinfonietta and guitarist Jonny Greenwood.
If the formal atmosphere was more subdued and the hall less intimate, the playing, under conductor Chloe Rooke, was crisp and controlled. Pulse, written in 2015, saw canonic wind and string melodies spun out over piano-led ostinatos in one of the composer’s more relaxed works. Greenwood played electric bass, providing a neat link with Radio Rewrite, a Sinfonietta commission from 2013, in which Reich partly absorbs and partly riffs on a pair of songs by Radiohead.
Opening the second half, Greenwood brought clean-as-a-whistle technique and a distinctive personality (not always associated with this composer’s music) to Electric Counterpoint. A tenacious performance pitted live electric guitar against his own pre-recorded version of Reich’s original backing track. To finish, the Sinfonietta gave a gritty account of City Life.
Sampling keyboards introduced urban sounds, from car horns and door slams to heartbeats and police sirens, into the orchestral mix in a kinetic tribute to Reich’s native New York.
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