Name: TECTONICS: Cory Smythe
Start: 2023-04-29T16:30:00
Location: Elbphilharmonie

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

Pianist Cory Smythe’s music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader) and here improvises on the jazz standard Smoke Gets In Your Eyes — or some semblance of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: its swirling, spiralling vocality, its portrayal of deceit and disappearance, its fluidic memorial to acrid, heart-breaking loss. In addition, he attempts to add to (and undermine) the piano’s resources of sound with extensions of concealed computerized origin. The piano here, like the love affair lamented in the Kern/Harbach standard, isn't quite what it seems.