An ambitious five-day festival brought some swinging individuality to the work of Steve Reich, writes MICHAEL DERVAN
THERE’S A FIRM and fresh wind blowing at the Cork Opera House. The venue’s new chief executive Mary Hickson has made her mark by taking what most people regarded as a huge step into the unknown, a five-day Reich Effect festival, celebrating the 75th birthday of leading minimalist composer Steve Reich.
Reich has been celebrated in Ireland before, by the late, lamented RTÉ Living Music Festival in 2006. However, the resoundingly successful RTÉ festival was two days shorter, and didn't run as many of Reich's pieces. There were many sceptical eyebrows raised at the scale of the Cork undertaking. But the attendances were healthy, the atmosphere good, the audiences enthusiastic, and the composer himself seemed delighted, not least by Cork's special gift, an opening night performance of his Six Marimbasarranged by Mel Mercier for an ensemble of traditional Irish musicians.
Hickson and her co-curator, cellist Kate Ellis, chose what you might call a block approach to programming, presenting particular strands of the composer’s work in hour-long samplings.
The conceptual rigours of the early phase pieces – multi-layered pieces which force identical patterns out of phase with each other to create the musical equivalent of slowing shifting moiré patterns – were presented together, but were quite eclipsed by Nic Gareiss dancing the rhythms of Clapping Musicwith his pre-recorded self, a leftfield tour-de-force with irresistible wow factor.
The four Counterpointpieces, each written for a different solo instrument (flute, clarinet, electric guitar, cello) and pitting the live instrument against richly-textured, pre-recorded layers of itself, were also presented as a group.
There was one performance which stood out from the others, Niwel Tsumbu's handling of Electric Counterpointbringing a swinging individuality to the guitar playing that managed to make the music seem entirely his own without betraying its original character.
And there was probably no question that the first part of Drummingwas going to outshine anything else that was put in a programme of percussion music. London's O Duo with Catriona Frost and Alex Petcu Colan took the bit between their teeth and placed the music at the beginning of their concert, a decision which didn't actually detract from what followed, but just put everyone in the best possible mood.
The big visiting acts of the three days of the festival that I attended were the Kronos Quartet, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra under Robert Ziegler and the London Sinfonietta. Kronos offered the Irish première of the self-explanatory WTC 9/11.It's for amplified string quartet and its three movements use recordings directly associated with the World Trade Center attack of 10 years ago, the voices of air traffic controllers, workers from the New York City Fire Department, local residents, women who sat saying psalms with the bodies of the dead.
The musical technique is already familiar, that of distilling musical material from the pitches and rhythms of the spoken word, and then using it to marry speech recordings with live performance. And the choice of a big subject is also one that Reich has come to make more and more often.
But, even with its harsher musical language, the new piece doesn't seem to score as directly as Different Trainsof 1988 (which also featured in Kronos's programme), where the composer recollected the sounds he heard as a child journeying between divorced parents. He contrasted his experience with the very different train journeys being made by fellow Jews in the wartorn Europe of the time. It may be that the 9/11 experience is still too raw, and that the words are carrying an emotional burden that actually needed to be left to the music.
The orchestral programme was, for me, something of a damp squib. Two pieces by Nico Muhly ( Step Teamand So to Speak) seemed to take an overly naive approach to creating oh-what-a-bad-boy-am-I effects. Kjartan Sveinsson's Credowas awkwardly maudlin, though it provided an effective platform for The Voice Effect, a new choir created by John O'Brien. Jonny Greenwood's Doghouse was altogether more effective, almost gorging in orchestral voluptuousness, but didn't really know where to draw the line or when to stop. It all may have had something to do with Ziegler's conducting, because even Reich's Eight Linesdidn't quite gel under his direction.
There were no such problems in the London Sinfonietta's conductorless performance of Reich's 1976 Music for 18 Musicians, a pulsating wall of sound with honeyed female voices and winds, and an extraordinary amalgam of pianos and marimbas.
It’s a landmark not just in Reich’s output, but in the music of the last half century, the effect being not unlike that of a Hydra of a synthesizer that requires 18 musicians to keep it running. It’s truly unique, once heard, never forgotten.
