On the same team at last – Steve Reich and Gerhard Richter in harmony

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.

Steve Reich’s specially-composed work for this collaboration Reich/Richter was far more adventurous. Patterns oscillated and clashed to create unexpected textures, and larger motifs appeared above. Reich’s trademark pulsating piano chords provided a foundation for woodwind instruments that intertwined and tangled above. Its harmonic brashness mirrored wonderfully that of its partnered work by Gerhard Richter, painting 946-3.

Gerhard Richter’s abstract visual works are mesmeric enough, but transposed to video by Corinna Belz, 946-3 took on a completely new lease of life, multiplying and repeating to create “anthropomorphic creatures”. The screen teemed with colour, and as the show went on with these weird, mutated creatures reminded me more and more of Hieronymus Bosch crossed with a Rorschach test.

Like Richter, Reich was originally a creator for the art gallery; in his earlier years when concert halls weren’t so interested in his minimalist works, he took them to New York galleries instead. And in many ways his music needs the same careful examination as Richter’s large canvas; it helps to be up close and personal with the musicians, watching the patterns mutate from the bows and fingers and lips of the players, as well as hearing them.

This collaboration is a coming together of two icons of contemporary culture, only four years apart in age, who have something of a shared approach. While Richter might be maximal in colour, and Reich minimal in rhythm and harmony, the sum of their works is much greater than the parts. Richter’s window in Cologne Cathedral, for example, simple in its composition (but presumably not in its construction, consisting of 11,500 glass squares of 72 different colours), conjures a permanently-pixelated rainbow effect throughout the building. In Reich’s works, whether a miniature like Violin Phase (first performed in a New York gallery in 1967), or his monumental Music for 18 Musicians, small units of rhythm and melody come together to create a big, throbbing mass.

Reich/Richter is the first glimpse we’ve had here in Europe of what Alex Poots and Hans Ulrich Obrist have been dreaming up at The Shed in New York, the city’s glittering, eye-wateringly expensive new arts centre at Hudson Yards in Manhattan, which opened earlier this year. It’s interesting to note that for its world premiere in New York, Reich/Richter was actually performed in the gallery space at The Shed, giving audience members the opportunity to wander around and take in the morphing sounds and shapes with different degrees and perspectives.

Over the next six months, Reich/Richter travels to Luxembourg and Paris in the hands of Ensemble Intercontemporain and Elim Chan, and then to Oslo with the Philharmonic and Olari Elts conducting. In Paris, it forms part of a larger Steve Reich Weekend at the Philharmonie (7 – 8 March), which will attempt to distil over two days Reich’s myriad inspirations, and his far-reaching influence on others, with everything from Javanese Gamelan to an exploration of The Birth of Sounds, a new programme on the relationship between noise, sound and music. The man himself will also be in attendance, talking about his relationship with other art forms. Be prepared for whoops and cheers.