Steve Reich is 90, which feels a bit wrong as his music has always been so youthfully vibrant – as has he. There are a lot of celebratory concerts taking place in London at the moment, and this seemed the most appropriate one to go to: Music for 18 Musicians, perhaps the summatory work of early minimalism. At the Southbank Centre on Sunday it was performed by the Paraorchestra in a promenade interpretation, audience members strolling among the spread-out performers, theatrical lighting effects and dancers added into the mix.
And if not true to the original conception for this piece (Reich made a careful map of how the instruments should be arranged in tight formation) it felt true to the spirit of early minimalist performances in 60s New York lofts, happenings shorn of traditional buttoned-up concert manners, trance-inducing loops coloured by a fog of suspicious smoke.
The Paraorchestra is a self-described “fearless collective of disabled and non-disabled musicians: a platform that pushes the boundaries of music-making” and I have seen them in action before at the Clore Ballroom, this kind of spatial presentation with perambulating audience becoming a trademark device. But Music for 18 Musicians, which they performed as part of the Proms in Bristol last month, is unforgiving repertoire, requiring ultra-precise co-ordination and tightly locked-in grooves. Scattering the players like this makes a hard piece even harder. Despite the players all having click-tracks in their ears, there were occasional wobbles, mostly quickly overcome. And the degree of ensemble that was achieved was extraordinary, given it was perhaps 15 metres from one side of the group to the other. I doubt the players have ever concentrated so hard, and yet they did succeed in achieving the relaxed looseness this music needs.
What this approach did was to place us audience members at a giant mixing desk. By moving here or there we could focus in on the contribution an individual player was making to the texture, while fading out other players. It gave a fascinating insight into the workings of the engine of this masterful piece. So I stood near the throbbing bass clarinets for the start, made my way to the “oohing” and “dooping” singers for their moment, to the marimbas for the extraordinary passage where there are three players on one instrument, their sticks interlocking but never colliding, and to the individual pianos for their insistent, unbending patterns. And then went to the front to get the whole sonic picture. It was immersive in the best sense, and cast fresh light on a piece I know well, and reinforced my sense of its brilliance.
There were lighting effects, cutting through the smoke-machine smoke, at one point turning the space into a glitterball disco, and six dancers interpreting the music with fluid and fast gyrations – and at one point corralling the audience into a giant conga-line. I found these superfluous – the music was enough for me, and there was a danger of sensory overload – but other people were clearly enjoying them.
As artistic director Charles Hazlewood said, in an impressive pre-concert speech, this was a mad plan, but its ambition was justified, making for a unique experience and a fresh insight into a classic work. The hour passed very fast. The only disappointing thing for me was the number of people filming, often for quite a long time, as if any film would ever capture what it was like to be there. This is music to lose yourself in, to live with in the moment. Put your phones away, folks.
