The Festival Hall was predictably packed for this all-Reich concert, the excitement heightened by the fact that not only was a new piece in the offing but that one of the numerous baseball-capped heads dotted around the audience was Steve Reich's own. The piece, commissioned by the London Sinfonietta, can claim significance because while Reich has always argued that concert composers should draw on rock music, he hasn't done so much himself . Here, though, he has taken two Radiohead songs as the basis for a work called Radio Rewrite.
Those Radiohead fans (and band members) present will not have missed the snippets from Everything in its Right Place and Jigsaw, but the piece absorbs only a handful of gestures from the songs into an otherwise familiar compositional framework, with alternating fast and slow movements, and oppositions between paired vibraphones and pianos giving structure and drive to the melodic material. In its instrumentation and quasi-renaissance voice-leading, in which the slow-moving lines of the melodic instruments are scrunched together, the piece's strongest resemblance was to 2008's masterpiece Double Sextet, a superb performance of which followed (and slightly overpowered) the new work in the concert's second half. If Reich's "rock" credentials were on display, this was felt most strongly in the first half, where the two main pieces – the overlong 2x5 and the wonderfully inventive Electric Counterpoint, performed by Swedish guitarist Mats Bergström – both use electric guitars.
The inevitable opening rendition of Clapping Music, for which the Sinfonietta's David Hockings was joined by Reich himself, benefitted from Sound Intermedia's excellent projection, yielding more variety of tone than one usually gets in the piece. It was also a nice reminder of how Reich, for all his celebrity, remains a musicians' musician, his work drawing on a profound respect for craft and graft, and filled, in consequence, by the heat of genuine artistic collaboration.
Performance available on BBC iPlayer until Tuesday.
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