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Day One of an innovative two-day festival brings a range of orchestral showpieces and contemporary works in a series of one hour concerts. 

In an evening entitled “Pulse: Steve Reich and his influences”, the Aurora Orchestra set out to give three examples of pieces that influenced American minimalist composer Steve Reich alongside performing two of his pieces.

Inside Juilliard’s Paul Hall, a splendid spectacle of geometric juxtaposition greets the eyes. The wood-paneled interior is a busy mishmash of thin vertical rectangles and squares of varying sizes, whose right angles are further contrasted by a row of glossy spherical lights on each wall.

Minimal music, the rhythm- and/or repetition-focused classical genre from the later 20th century, is well represented at Amsterdam's Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. This will surely come to a climax during the 2013 edition of the biannual World Minimal Music Festival, but as Marinissen of Lunapark stated before this warm-up edition: "We just couldn't wait".