Sometimes, just sometimes, a concert programme can produce something so original, so unexpected that it can eclipse the main event. Reich/Richter – a spectacular collaboration between the American composer Steve Reich and the German artist Gerhard Richter – was certainly top of the London Sinfonietta’s bill at the Festival Hall, but the piece that stuck in the mind afterwards was entirely different, and a mere six minutes long.
Anna Clyne’s striking Fractured Time was given its world premiere modestly tucked in among four lesser contemporary pieces that made up the first half of the programme. It’s a frantic whirlwind of creativity that the composer says “explores the experience of time in states of fever, lucidity and anxiety”.
It achieves all this with an extraordinary degree of concentrated sophistication. Other composers would spread her myriad ideas across a wider canvas, but Clyne is content to leave us running behind, breathless at the speed at which she shifts from mood to mood, genre to genre. A deliciously schmaltzy “lounge” tune, presumably representing lucidity, gives way to scattered nervous jitters, with snatches of Stravinsky thrown in to heighten the tension. We return to the schmaltz before clattering off in another direction, this time with Shostakovich for company. And then it’s over, gone before you can take it all in.
Fractured Time will surely go into the repertoire. It was commissioned by the Los Angeles Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra and shared with the Sinfonietta for its premiere. They played it brilliantly. I can’t wait to hear it again.
I was fortunate to be at the 2019 premiere of Reich/Richter when it opened the Shed, New York’s $500m cultural centre, part of a $25bn redevelopment of the city’s Hudson Yards district, then the largest building project in the US. (This was when London was still planning an ambitious Centre for Music and all eyes were on the Shed’s architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who were to design the centre; how distant those days seem now.) The Shed premiere had its problems. The work, scored for strings, woodwind, two pianos and two vibraphones, is tailored to complement the film Moving Picture (946-3) by Richter and Corinna Belz. This was projected in small format on to a wall at one end of a flat-floored room, with Ensemble Signal at the other. Audience members stood with their backs to the band, losing some of the connection with the music and obscuring much of the film from each other.
There were no such problems at the Royal Festival Hall, with Moving Picture projected on to a massive screen behind the Sinfonietta so that we could immediately appreciate the synergy between score and image. The film opened with two-pixel bands of colour, matched by an oscillating pattern of two quavers. As the pixels increase to four, the pattern moves to four quavers, then eight and 16 and so on. Eventually this becomes impossible to sustain as the film’s digital loom weaves ever more intricate designs on its way to 1,064 pixels, so Reich introduces longer note values, slowing the music as the entire screen is filled with ever-multiplying exotic shapes.
These gradually dissipate as the pixel count reduces and the image returns to its original state, the music following suit. Reich’s mathematical rigour has the intensity of Bach, and produces – as so often in Bach – uplifting, joyously optimistic music, particularly in the opening and closing sections of Reich/Richter. Conductor Manoj Kamps was the cool head who kept it all together so triumphantly.
And so to JS Bach himself. Print deadlines are unforgiving things and conspire every year to keep Easter music reviews out of Easter Sunday papers, so indulge me for a moment while I go back and reflect on Good Friday’s St John Passion, performed by Polyphony and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, under Stephen Layton. Even with church attendance in decline, it seems the desire to hear the Christian story and its message of redemption is as strong as ever in these febrile times, with performances of the Bach Passions drawing large audiences right across the country in search of a sense of the divine.
Of course a deep spirituality is always to be found in Bach, but particularly when it is performed so sincerely by top-flight musicians such as tenor Nick Pritchard (no relation, sadly), Evangelist in the Polyphony performance. He sang from memory with such exquisite care, communicating his story directly to every one of us, often soft and gentle, pained at what he had to tell, and then visibly angry at the bone-headed chorus baying for Jesus’s crucifixion. This was an outstanding interpretation, an Evangelist for today.
Bass Ashley Riches was equally vivid in his lip-curling portrayal of cynical Pilate, with intense, moving solos from soprano Rowan Pierce, tenor Ruairi Bowen and mezzo Helen Charlston, who handled the grief and triumph in Es ist vollbracht! with startling clarity. Obbligato playing from within the orchestra was elegant throughout. And behind them all, rock-solid, alert to every nuance in the drama, stood Polyphony, diction crisp, phrasing meticulous. Simply superb.
Star ratings (out of five)
Reich/Richter ★★★★
St John Passion ★★★★★
