Name: TECTONICS: GBSR Duo
Start: 2026-05-03T17:30:00
Location: Old Fruitmarket

George Barton

Siwan Rhys

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

GBSR Duo

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

BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show presenter Kate Molleson describes Oliver Leith’s 2018 composition as “deadpan, subversive, quietly anarchic, disarmingly heart-sore and sweet-sour,” music that makes “masterful use of space, placement, sparse forces and really deft repetition.” Leith calls it a tender look at the simultaneously debilitating and beautiful irrationalities of our everyday lives; how our obsessions and compulsions surface and the rituals, superstitions and routines we all play out to appease our minds… and how that never really works. Created in collaboration with the GBSR Duo (percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys, recipients of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist Award 2025), the work offers disarming reflections on performance, relationships, codependency and mental health, staged within an instrument-strewn setting inspired by the duo’s own flat.