Two birthdays were marked at the Southbank Centre's Steve Reich festival: the composer turns 90 on 3 October, and his signature work Music for 18 Musicians reaches its half-century this year. An immersive performance of the latter invited the audience to move among an ensemble spread around the Clore Ballroom, with the collective grins on faces taken as proof of the work's enduring power to raise the spirits.
Paraorchestra's immersive Music for 18 Musicians
Performing was Paraorchestra, Charles Hazlewood's 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 and disco lights featured in what was described as an exhilarating performance.
London Sinfonietta and Jonny Greenwood in the Festival Hall
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.
Electric Counterpoint and City Life
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.
