An Evening with Steve Reich, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester

It is so common now to see performers use devices such as loop pedals that the notion of watching a musician play along to a backing tape seems almost antiquated. As Steve Reich reminds us, however – during an evening of Royal Northern College of Music students performing a selection of his work – he was playing with the possibilities of pre-recording before almost anyone else.

It is the sense of movement and development created by the shifting patterns of Reich’s music that makes it still so exciting today, more than 40 years after some of it was written. Reich himself appears for Clapping Music, in which two performers gradually progress in and out of tempo in what must, in terms of both rehearsal and concentration, be an endurance test – and, in Cello Counterpoint, a live cellist performs feats of musicianship that defy your eyes’ ability to keep up against multi-layered recordings of himself.

The evening culminates in Different Trains, which makes the most effective use of pre-recording of all. An emotional work drawn from Reich’s reminiscences of train journeys across America and imaginings of parallel trips through wartime Europe, it is almost cinematic in scale and length. With its unexpected instrumentation of whistles and sirens – and strings directly echoing fragments of recorded memories of the war – it places you both in the vast space that separates New York and Los Angeles and in the dark confusion of the Holocaust years.

Appropriately for a performance that forms part of a festival called FutureEverything, the audience is made up of listeners far younger than those you might usually expect to see at a classical concert – and Reich’s influence is such that he has attracted not only music students but also rock and indie fans. As he acknowledges during the question and answer session that concludes the concert, the crossover has never been greater – and, as exemplified earlier in the evening during Electric Counterpoint, with its live guitarist plucking delicate, African-inspired melodies over amplifiers emitting shimmering, strummed chords, Reich’s music is classical at its most accessible and rock‘n’roll.

An Evening with Steve Reich, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester

It is so common now to see performers use devices such as loop pedals that the notion of watching a musician play along to a backing tape seems almost antiquated. As Steve Reich reminds us, however – during an evening of Royal Northern College of Music students performing a selection of his work – he was playing with the possibilities of pre-recording before almost anyone else.

It is the sense of movement and development created by the shifting patterns of Reich’s music that makes it still so exciting today, more than 40 years after some of it was written. Reich himself appears for Clapping Music, in which two performers gradually progress in and out of tempo in what must, in terms of both rehearsal and concentration, be an endurance test – and, in Cello Counterpoint, a live cellist performs feats of musicianship that defy your eyes’ ability to keep up against multi-layered recordings of himself.

The evening culminates in Different Trains, which makes the most effective use of pre-recording of all. An emotional work drawn from Reich’s reminiscences of train journeys across America and imaginings of parallel trips through wartime Europe, it is almost cinematic in scale and length. With its unexpected instrumentation of whistles and sirens – and strings directly echoing fragments of recorded memories of the war – it places you both in the vast space that separates New York and Los Angeles and in the dark confusion of the Holocaust years.

Appropriately for a performance that forms part of a festival called FutureEverything, the audience is made up of listeners far younger than those you might usually expect to see at a classical concert – and Reich’s influence is such that he has attracted not only music students but also rock and indie fans. As he acknowledges during the question and answer session that concludes the concert, the crossover has never been greater – and, as exemplified earlier in the evening during Electric Counterpoint, with its live guitarist plucking delicate, African-inspired melodies over amplifiers emitting shimmering, strummed chords, Reich’s music is classical at its most accessible and rock‘n’roll.