Reich/Richter is a 2019 ensemble piece by Steve Reich, composed to be played alongside an abstract film, Moving Picture (946-3), by the German artist Gerhard Richter. The development of the music is matched to the gradual metamorphosis of the computer-generated visual patterns as they shift from a single bar of vivid colour to screen-filling patterns of lush, bewildering complexity, like a constantly changing oriental carpet, before reversing the process and returning to a single line.
Reich always intended that his score should have an independent life in the concert hall, away from the visuals, and heard in that form it is one of his most powerful and convincing recent works. Here, however, the London Sinfonietta performed it as originally conceived, with Richter’s film projected behind the players. Certainly hearing and seeing it live in that form is a fascinating experience, gripping for the first 15 minutes or so, but increasingly exhausting and ultimately reductive thereafter. Simultaneously listening to Reich’s score as it develops from the hard-edged pulsings of the opening to more melodic fragments and sustained pitches, while watching Richter’s images become ever more intricate, inevitably relegates one element or the other to mere accompaniment despite the sheer exuberance of it all and sensory overload to wallow in.
Before it Manoj Kamps had conducted a series of smaller-scale pieces which were framed by two realisations, one woodwind-based, the other for strings and percussion, and both rather gentle, of Julius Eastman’s Joy Boy. Anna Clyne’s Fractured Time, receiving its world premiere, was brief, tangled and joyous; Julia Wolfe’s Tell Me Everything typically energetic, rowdy and a bit gritty, while Mira Calix’s Nunu was included as a touching tribute to the artist and composer who died a year ago; it’s a fragile web of string shivers and scrapings, heard against an evocative background of live insect noises.
