Two giants of contemporary culture unite for an engrossing evening
Steve Reich/ Gerhard Richter
Britten Sinfonia, Barbican, London EC2 ★★★★★
Bringing together one of the world’s greatest living composers and the most celebrated living painter to make a joint music-andmoving-images work: it’s certainly a dream ticket from the marketing point of view. And as Wednesday night’s performance of Reich/richter from the Britten Sinfonia and conductor Colin Currie showed, when there’s a real affinity of mind and method it can lead to something of truly spellbinding power.
You might not expect such an affinity, in the case of German painter Gerhard Richter and composer Steve Reich. The painter is a chameleon, trying out so many styles in his long career that he seems like 10 painters in one. Reich, by contrast, has ploughed a single furrow for his equally long career, playing with the possibilities of repeating patterns in ever-shifting layers. But Richter discovered recently that thanks to digital technology, his recent abstract paintings could yield a thousand variants of themselves. They could be divided into ever-smaller sections which were then reflected to form symmetrical shapes. So now Richter’s and Reich’s worlds could touch, through a fascination with pattern.
In collaboration with the filmmaker Corinna Belz, Richter turned one of these paintings into a dazzling series of images, which here were projected above the orchestra on a screen. We saw flickering, ever-changing horizontal lines of brilliant colours, which gradually swelled and morphed into fabulously elaborate symmetrical patterns, constantly dividing like amoebas. Meanwhile, Reich’s music, composed for his typical sound-palette of vibraphones and pianos and a handful of strings and winds, swelled from a simple, hectic two-note repeated pattern to dense soft-edged skeins of harmonies in which pulsation almost disappeared.
At a visceral level, one could enjoy the overall movement in images and sound from flickering speed to majestic slowness, and back again. And it was interesting to see how pattern-making could prompt association and memory.
Richter’s patterns, processing slowly across the screen, sometimes looked like those fantastical images of deities you find on Tibetan mandalas, but there was a deadness about them. One could tell they were the unintended result of a computer’s manipulation of “dead” pixels. By contrast, Reich’s patterns – played with surpassing vigour and delicacy – actually had a power to move. Sometimes, they had a faint echo of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, or even – surprisingly – the plangent, Nordicitalian lyricism of Sibelius. The reminder that the human factor still counts was not the least rewarding aspect of this engrossing and brilliantly executed event.