RTÉ's Living Music Festival buzzed with excitement - because the popular and versatile composer was in town, writes Michael Dervan
The jinx has been broken. In its fourth outing, the RTÉ Living Music Festival has at last succeeded in getting one of its major featured composers, in person, to Dublin for the event. And what Steve Reich turned up for was the fullest, most focused, and most popular programme the festival has yet offered. Packed houses were the order of the day.
The mysterious factor X which can make festivals buzz with anticipation and excitement was present in abundance at the concerts planned by this year's artistic director, Donnacha Dennehy.
It helped, of course, that Reich, who was instrumental in moving minimalism into the mainstream from the 1970s onwards, is actually, in a straightforward sense, a popular composer. He's popular in the way Arthur Rubinstein was as a pianist and Arturo Toscanini as a conductor. His reputation is not confined to aficionados of classical music. Curiosity about his work and person crosses many familiar divides of musical taste and generation.
It helped, too, that there's more than one Steve Reich for listeners to deal with. There's a Reich we don't know much about at all, the one in his teens and twenties who wrote the music which predates the tape pieces of the mid 1960s, the earliest works he now allows to be heard. He joked in a composition seminar that, on seeing a posthumous show of lesser work by the painter Edward Hopper, he took the precaution of bulk-erasing a load of his own early tape pieces.
The early Reich that we know was a rigorous explorer of technical processes, interested in investigating the outcome of superimposing like-on-like sounds with a real-world match that was not quite perfect. The results could be thought of as audible moiré patterns which, because we're dealing with music, emerge and reveal their transformations over time.
The fundamental process which drives the tape piece It's Gonna Rain (1965) is quite simple. Yet this manipulation of repeated loops of speech getting out of phase with themselves remains utterly striking, even four decades on, not something that can be said of many of the tape pieces of the time.
Reich's use of regimented instrumentation - for a while he favoured multiples of the same instrument - produced intriguing effects of disorientation (like the floor re-patterning itself under your feet) and ambiguity (where's the downbeat?). And, as Ensemble Modern showed on Sunday in the first section of Drumming (1970-71) - the title says it all - the musical result can be adrenaline-rich and visceral.
The first of Reich's pieces to bring him a wide rather than a cult following was Music for 18 Musicians (1974-76), a phantasmagorically elaborate, harmonically-glowing, hour-long pulsating texture of wordless voices and instruments that has come to represent the Reich sound par excellence. In a first-rate performance, as offered by Synergy Vocals and Ensemble Modern under Sian Edwards, it is irresistibly ear-tickling and entrancing.
Another Reich, initially influenced by his engagement with his Jewish heritage, discovered word setting. Proverb (1995), affectingly performed by members of the National Chamber Choir and Ensemble Modern under Celso Antunes, sets texts by Ludwig Wittgenstein (the composer was a philosophy major at Cornell) in a manner that relates audibly to the compositional techniques of the 12th-century Pérotin.
The Holocaust-inspired Different Trains (1988) (the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet in a technically gremlined Project Arts Centre) uses sampling techniques to blur the distinction between the rhythm and pitch of the spoken word and the rise and fall of an instrumental line, while documenting train journeys between divorced parents in the composer's childhood, and very different train journeys in the war-torn Europe of the 1940s.
The most recent Reich, in You Are (Variations), a four-movement setting of epigrammatic texts for voices and ensemble (Synergy Vocals, Ensemble Modern), has embraced a complexity of harmony that would once have seemed almost unimaginable, while remaining completely himself. This piece also features the real rarity of a slow movement in an output renowned for its wall-of-sound drive and energy.
At the heart of the festival was a nearly 12-hour marathon at O'Reilly Theatre, with the probably too hard-working Crash Ensemble showing signs of wear and tear in performances which placed Reich's work in the context of some of his contemporaries and successors.
Three specially-commissioned Irish works were premiered over the day. Jennifer Walshe's The Procedure for Smoothing Air revisits some of her trademark unconventional gestures without breaking new ground. Simon O'Connor's The Paradise (Part III) is a piano solo of unusual but ultimately limited inwardness. And Kevin Volans's Tenth String Quartet (from the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet) suggests but does not quite dwell in areas of darkness.
Both RTÉ orchestras took part. The unamplified RTÉ Concert Orchestra under Christopher Austin battled to no great avail against the extremely dry acoustic of the O'Reilly Theatre. The RTÉ NSO under Stefan Asbury made its best showing in Morton Feldman's "opera" Neither, a strangely-haunting collaboration with Samuel Beckett.
Sylvia O'Brien delivered the obsessive, awkwardly-lying soprano line with well-nigh impeccable poise.
