VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

The magic of modern musical minimalism lies in its simplistic repetition, organic gear shifts, and compulsive rhythmic propulsion from which springs an addictive Rock-style tension and, in the best examples, a transcendent euphoria. The fathers of that invention were, of course, the American minimalists, among them Steve Reich, whose music was the nucleus of this latest SCO New Dimensions programme – Steve Reich+ – curated and directed by star Scots percussionist Colin Currie.

Who better to engage with Reich’s music than Currie, whose longterm performance association with the now 89-year-old composer has given him a first-hand insight that set the second half of this concert ablaze? It included Runner, dating from 2016, and the earlier Double Sextet of 2002, both as fascinating to the eye as to the ear, given their stereophonic use of mirrored ensembles. 

Currie’s innate rhythmic presence as a percussionist proved the perfect credentials for invigorating these relatively late pieces, both of which lean to the Reich of old – edgy, motorised impetus heightened by cellular organic transformation – yet harness moments of softened, more reflective charm. 

The more heavily-scored Runner, an evolving play on different note durations, benefitted from a vitally sustained performance, rich in textural ingenuity and contrast, compulsive in its unstoppable drive to the finish. If the outer sections of the Double Sextet preserved the mechanistic excitement, with notably virtuosic elan, the ghostly reveries of the calming central movement took us to another, more introspective world. But only briefly.

This being a New Dimensions programme, Currie turned his attention in the first half to younger compositional voices – also friends of his – whose representative works owed varying indebtedness to Reich. First up was Joe Duddell’s Snowblind, the only work of the evening in which Currie jointly functioned as soloist. 

Written originally in 2001 for the former BT Scottish Ensemble, much of it oozes Reichian DNA, the moto perpetuo marimba-led dynamism of the opening Vivace dizzyingly incessant, the final moments equally so after the woozy pseudo-Baroque pastoralism of the central Lento. It wasn’t always the tidiest of performances, and there is something very Tippett-like in Duddell’s writing – a kind of self-effacing intangibility – that felt frustratingly incomplete.

Not so Helen Grime’s River, this being the UK premiere of a work first performed in 2023 by the Staatsorchester Hamburg in its wonderful riverside concert hall. From the very outset, Currie capitalised on the fuller colour spectrum and textural flexibility explored by Grime in her vivid soundscape. From rapid watery flurries to milky calms, spectral luminescence to dark undercurrents, and a final swirling representation of the river’s passage to the sea (signing off with a tangible nod to Britten’s Peter Grimes), this may have been the most un-Reichian music of the evening, but in spirit it certainly played its part.

Ken Walton