Colin Currie vividly recalls the moment he first met Steve Reich in person. The occasion was a concert at London’s Southbank Centre in 2011 featuring Reich’s landmark early work Drumming (1970–71), in a performance by Currie’s own ensemble. Though he had previously received encouragement from Reich, this was the first time that the eminent American composer’s gruelling schedule made it possible for him to hear the Colin Currie Group live.
“It was actually rather nerve-wracking, because I knew that we played Drumming very differently to his own ensemble, and to most other versions that I’d heard,” Currie tells me in a recent video call from his home in Glasgow. “Fortunately, he loved it and was very taken by this version. It was certainly a new path for the music. I think that’s what he appreciated.”
Throughout the entirety of his professional life, Currie has remained deeply involved in Reich’s music. The composer, for his part, not only praises the Colin Currie Group’s performances of his music as among “the best I’ve ever heard” but even dedicated his 2013 Quartet to Currie as “a percussionist who has broken the mold.” Both Quartet (for two pianos and two vibraphones) and the more recent Traveler’s Prayer (2020), a piece for small ensemble and four singers, are significant compositions that Reich entrusted Currie and his ensemble to premiere.
The Hallé’s three-day Steve Reich Festival (1st–3rd February) promises to be a unique event in Currie’s continuing engagement with the composer. “There have of course been other large festivals devoted to Steve Reich, but often with other composers represented as well. But to have such a concentrated portrayal over three concerts, every note of which is Steve’s music, might be the most comprehensive presentation of his work ever by a British orchestra.”
Beginning with his curation of more than ten compositions that span nearly a half-century of Reich’s career, Currie is playing multiple roles in the festival. He will conduct the Hallé Orchestra as well as young musicians from the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) and Chetham’s School of Music; additionally, he will himself perform as a percussionist in some of the pieces. It’s a wall-to-wall Reich festival comprising two evening concerts at the Hallé’s home venue in Manchester, Bridgewater Hall, as well as an afternoon chamber programme at Hallé St Peter’s.
Currie’s passion for the music of Steve Reich started at an early age. He recalls first registering the composer’s name when he was 12 or 13 and a member of the youth orchestra in Edinburgh. “Somebody handed me the single-page score of Clapping Music” (from 1972 – the earliest work being presented in the festival).
He later became overwhelmed by his discovery of the recording Reich made with his own ensemble of Music for 18 Musicians (released on ECM in 1978). “That went straight to the top of my hit parade. It was like a breath of fresh air: the beautiful harmonies and the gorgeous orchestration, with all the percussion, winds and singers, was so different.”
“I became such a big fan of his work that I was always trying to work out a way to get to play his music when I was still finding my feet as a soloist 20 years ago.” A major break came when Currie was offered carte blanche to put together a late-night portrait concert at the 2006 BBC Proms celebrating Reich’s 70th birthday. He chose Drumming, a large-scale composition that blends tuned and untuned percussion with two women’s voices.
Currie assembled his own percussion ensemble from friends and colleagues, in the process founding the Colin Currie Group. “We’d all grown up together and formed quite a tight unit, which was only become tighter over the years.”
Already from the start, Currie was intent on exploring a path of his own into this enormously influential body of work. That influence extends well beyond the rarefied sphere of avant-garde and modern classical music. Just take the example of Radiohead, whose lead guitarist and keyboard player Jonny Greenwood will also participate in the Steve Reich Festival.
“Jonny Greenwood is very similar to myself as a Reich super fan,” says Currie. “He would still be a musician without Steve Reich, but his life would not be the same. I would say the same thing about Radiohead, which still exists without Steve Reich but wouldn’t sound like the Radiohead that we know and love. He immediately jumped to the chance when I invited him.”
The third concert will open with the four-hand piece Clapping Music, and Jonny Greenwood will also perform the 1987 Electric Counterpoint for electric guitar and tape. Currie says Greenwood’s presence “is a nice way to bring in someone to also have a leading role, with a slightly different energy.” For the chamber programme, Currie has included Radio Rewrite, which Reich “affectionately wrote using material by Radiohead.”
Currie emphasises a sense of freedom he feels – whether working with the Colin Currie Group or other ensembles, such as the Hallé and RNCM musicians – to shape interpretations that can swerve from performances Reich himself has recorded with his colleagues over the years. The Colin Currie Group’s debut performance of Drumming back in 2006, for example, was “a slightly less streamlined, more expressionist version, more explosive, more volatile, with more shapes and a bit more swagger.”
It was precisely this difference in the way of playing his music, says Currie, that Reich admired. “Steve has always said that if music is not performable in a number of different ways, one has to question its value and its quality. Our way is very heart-on-sleeve.” That doesn’t mean compromising on the quest for technical finesse and precision, he adds. “I’ve tried to reconcile playing as a very tight unit but giving it a volatile expressive edge – so that we can live in the moment and take risks.”
The delicate balance between being true to the essence of Reich’s music and encouraging new interpretations comes to the fore when working with young musicians. “It’s incredibly important that I give them full understanding of the music and also allow them to find their own way. But I also have to apprise them of the tradition of whatever piece we’re playing and allow them to learn from that.”
“I’ve been fortunate to have worked very closely with the composer on all these pieces, and I’ve learned from him how they should go. I’ve also had a lot of experience to find my own answers to some of the conundrums posed by these pieces. The wheels of time do turn, and Steve Reich’s knowledge now will be passed on by my generation to the next.”
Currie enthuses about the opportunity to hear Reich’s music in Bridgewater Hall. “It’s my favourite concert hall in the United Kingdom and a fantastic place to play. The stage has a good layout that enhances the connection with the audience. You can do a lot with dynamics and it sounds natural, bloomy without being boomy. Steve’s music benefits from a little bit of space and natural bloom. Bridgewater will be perfect.”
As for working for the first time with the Hallé players, he says: “My passion for this music and the joy that I feel it brings in performance is what I want to share with the orchestra, which is a brilliant one. I think they’ll be intrigued and energised and excited by it.”
In curating the Hallé Festival, Currie has aimed for a representative combination of ensemble and orchestral works that trace the variety of Reich’s sonic worlds. Much of the composer’s output is scored for chamber ensemble configurations, often emphasising groupings of tuned percussion, but of the music that calls for larger forces, Currie is particularly excited about presenting The Desert Music (1983). This moving cantata sets excerpts from the 1954 anthology of the same name by the American poet William Carlos Williams, reflecting the new anxieties of the nuclear age that had just dawned.
“I’ve always had a deep love for this piece because it’s such a profound work – especially meaningful in this day and age.” Currie is also eager to introduce the audience to The Four Sections (1987) in the closing concert. This piece explores aspects of the symphony from a Reichian perspective (four movements, the four instrumental groups comprising an orchestra, for example). “It’s performed even more rarely than Desert Music but it’s a brilliant work. Steve writes great grooves: the last movement Four is a roof raiser, an incredible finale.”
Currie points to another favourite on the festival: Reich/Richter (2019), the most recently composed work of the three concerts, the European premiere of which Reich asked him to conduct in 2019. “Richter” here refers to the contemporary German painter Gerhard Richter; the music is related to a film Richter made with the director Corinna Belz but is not a “film score” and can be performed in concert independently. For Currie, Reich/Richter represents a new, different phase in the creativity of a composer who is approaching his 90th year and still hard at work.
“There’s a poignant, reflective side. One feels that he is considering what might be coming next. The music is very vulnerable and fragile, but exquisitely beautiful at the same time. Steve has never written finer music than he’s writing right now.”
Colin Currie leads The Hallé and the RNCM Chamber Choir in The Desert Music on 1st Feb, and in Reich’s chamber works at Hallé St Peters on 2nd Feb. He joins Jonny Greenwood for Electric Counterpoint on 3rd Feb.
This article was sponsored by Hallé Concerts Society.
