Name: Afternoon Performance: Fantasia: From Japan to Paris
Start: 2025-10-30T14:00:00
Location: City Halls

Lawrence Power

Ryan Wigglesworth

Claire Booth

Matthew Higham

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Steve Reich’s music is made of movement. Patterns shift, collide, and reform. The smallest rhythm grows into something vast. A single chord can shimmer like glass.

In Three Movements, the music constantly moves and turns. Repeating figures stretch and ripple until you lose track of where the downbeat lands. Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards is a kaleidoscope of colour. Chords slide past one another, glowing one moment, dissolving the next.

Electric Counterpoint, written for both pre-recorded and live guitars, turns repetition into a trance. With Bryce Dessner at its heart, expect a sound both mechanical and deeply human. Then The Four Sections pulls the whole orchestra into Reich’s pulsing universe – strings, winds, brass and percussion stacked into layers that vibrate with raw power.

Steve Reich at 90: The Four Sections

The Glasshouse International Centre for Music

Inspiration comes in many colours. Oliver Knussen heard a messenger from another world in the song of a Japanese cuckoo. Mark-Anthony Turnage’s viola concerto turns rough magic into poetry, and Tōru Takemitsu heard, as well as saw, the colours of his garden.