Reviews

A look at what is happening in the world of the arts.

Steve Reich Birthday Tribute

QFT/Waterfront Hall, Belfast

The New York composer Steve Reich will be 70 in October of next year. Irish organisations are getting in early with their celebrations. The Belfast Festival offered a tribute at the weekend, and RTÉ is planning for its Living Music Festival to feature Reich's music next February, with the composer himself present.

The Belfast tribute ran to concerts by the Smith String Quartet (Duet,Triple Quartet, and Different Trains) and the Ulster Orchestra (The Desert Music), three films (including one of the video opera, Three Tales), and installation-style performances of Pendulum Music.

The texts by William Carlos Williams that Reich selected for The Desert Music include a number of lines he must have delighted in as a composer of repetitive music - "It is a principle of music/to repeat the theme. Repeat/and repeat again".

Pendulum Music (microphones swinging over loudspeakers to produce phasing patterns in the feedback) and some of the pieces excerpted in the films showed how the composer first grappled with the potential of music crafted from super-imposition of minimally-shifting patterns. Reich enriched his rhythmic techniques through studies in Ghana and Bali, and extended his originally ascetic colouristic palette by enlarging and mixing his ensembles. The breakthrough piece, Music for 18 Musicians of 1974-76, featured in Belfast only on film.

He found a way of handling texts successfully within his expanding language - his striking use of vibratoless, sometimes wordless voices is a trademark - extended into multi-media work (Three Tales is a collaboration with his wife, video artist Beryl Korot), and successfully reinvigorated the treacherous undertaking of mixing live and recorded sounds.

Different Trains blends live and pre-recorded string quartet, sampled train sounds, and snippets of archive interviews. The title was prompted by Reich's recollection of his journeys as a child between divorced parents, and his reflection that, as a Jew, had he been living in Europe at that time, he would have had to ride very different trains.

The work's distinctive sound world is engrossing and touching, and it proved the highlight of the Smith Quartet's Reich offerings, more pointed in performance than the Triple Quartet, or the romantic-sounding Duet. The programme also included Kevin Volans's alluring Hunting, Gathering, and Webern's potently compact Five Movements, Op 5.

The Ulster Orchestra under Thierry Fischer began with John Adams's fire-cracking concert opener, A Short Ride in a Fast Machine, continued with Philip Glass's Company (intriguingly shaped and textured), and included the European premiere of Dark Florescence, a banal, Balinese gamelan-influenced concerto for two guitars (the under-utilised Benjamin Verdery on classical, the excessively highlighted Andy Summers on electric) by US composer Ingram Marshall.

The professional Irish premiere of The Desert Music, for which the orchestra was joined by the National Chamber Choir, was rather let down by the failure to provide the texts in the programme, and by the vagaries of the Waterfront Hall acoustics. But, happily, the music's pulsating richness, and the tingle-factor of the composer's texturally rewarding blending of voices and instruments triumphed over these adversities.

Michael Dervan

Luca

Project Upstairs, Dublin

This new Barabbas show is a fantasy with a malign difference. Its three characters are magical creatures who travel through time in search of pleasure, mostly of the debauched kind. Their leader Luca is spawn of the devil and a whore, and his companions are of similar provenance. Their predatory adventures are not limited by morality.

We first meet Luca rhapsodising about a woman named Mary, in words that suggest carnal but also romantic attraction. Then he joins his comrades in their games, filled with violence and sexual abandon, as when they join in a simulated orgy engaging all three in explicit miming, a pattern that is repeated throughout the play.

The adventurers flit back and forth through history, teasing dinosaurs, watching babies pop in the Great Plague, enjoying the mayhem in the fall of Rome and the French Revolution. They continually quarrel and make up, and finally Luca surrenders to the good instincts aroused by Mary Robinson, she of Mná na hÉireann. We leave him singing All Kinds of Everything while the others listen in nauseated submission.

The purpose of this must surely be the evocation of laughter. The programme notes inform us that the characters were inspired by the bouffon clowns of medieval times, bands of deformed misfits given to saying and doing the unspeakable. This is interesting as background, but does not make the play a very funny one. The performers are hugely skilful, but their material is of curate's-egg variety.

Raymond Keane is immense as Luca, and he is well partnered by Eoin Lynch and Amy Conroy in physical and vocal invention. Veronica Coburn directs with flair, and there is an exceptional multi-leaved set design by Alan Farquharson based on the dodecahedron.

Runs to Nov 19

Gerry Colgan