I had the rather surreal experience a few years ago of watching a film about American composer Steve Reich in an almost empty room; almost empty, as the only other person in this room – a former waiting room in an old station building in Liverpool, since reclaimed by arts institution Metal Liverpool – was Steve Reich himself. We sat there for about 20 minutes together, watching the film in silence, me a little star-struck, him perhaps a little bemused but largely unbothered by the experience of watching his talking head on screen.
The occasion was Reich’s 80th birthday celebrations, part of which was a live performance of his seminal work, Different Trains. The performance by the London Contemporary Orchestra, combined with a film by Bill Morrison, sticks in my mind as one of my most powerful cultural experiences to date. The capacity audience, packed into a downward-sloping cobbled station yard, nodded and toe-tapped en masse to the pounding, swirling, incestuous patterns of Different Trains, while actual trains chuntered past on either side. It was also amusing as Reich, usually a pretty quiet, background figure at this stage in his life, didn’t wholly approve of the sound engineering that night, and hopped on to the desk himself.
Now 83, Reich has developed a cult following over his long career, and despite his own reserved persona and appearance – only ever seen in his uniform of dark shirt and black blazer, topped off with his signature black baseball cap – he ignites great excitement in his fans in what are often rather sober concert halls. The professional-looking woman sitting next to me in Barbican Hall, a communications executive and mother to two grown-up children as I found out later, couldn’t help but let out whoops and cheers when Reich appeared on stage at the very end.
This was a reassuring reaction, as the first work in the programme left me feeling a little cold. Runner, written in 2016, is based on a Ghanaian bell pattern, which gets divided and manipulated, lengthened and shortened across five movements. A little sedate despite its title, but a useful precursor to the techniques that were to follow in the main event of the evening. Colin Currie, usually engaged in marathon Reich performances on all manner of percussion instruments, swapped his mallets for a baton to conduct the Britten Sinfonia, and marshalled the forces through it securely.
