Euphoric and immersive cinematic experience: Reich/Richter in Amsterdam

Amsterdam really is the place to be. With two world premieres in Dutch National Opera’s Opera Forward festival, the world premiere of Lady Macbeth at Dutch National Ballet and the much anticipated Mahler Festival at the Concertgebouw next month, the city is positively buzzing. Not to be outdone, the Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ hosted its own festival, Minimal Music Special, as a prelude to a full-blown edition in 2026. This concert featured the music of Steve Reich performed by one of his greatest proponents, British percussionist Colin Currie, joined by Dutch contemporary music ensemble, Asko|Schönberg.

The evening opened with two works from Reich’s early years. The first, Clapping Music (1972) saw Currie performing beneath a video of Reich’s mesmerising hands towering above. Special congratulations to percussionist Joey Marijs whose bright, yellow maracas in Four Organs (1970) transfixed the hall with his 16 minutes of unrelenting, chugging rhythm. The four Nord Stage 2 EX organs did a valiant job too in recreating a 1970s soundscape.

An electronic soundtrack played on a vintage reel-to-reel tape recorder featuring random names and conversations put through various electronic manipulations in the style of British, sonic art composer Trevor Wishart, was both a light-hearted link between Reich’s contrasting styles, and a useful distraction for the scene change.

The main focus of the evening however, was Reich/Richter, a multimedia synthesis of Reich’s music and the artwork of Dresden-born Gerhard Richter which premiered in New York in 2019. In his 2011 book Patterns, Richter took one of his most successful pictures Abstraktes Bild and produced endless, computer-generated images. By dividing the painting into twelve sections, cutting these images in half, in quarters and so on, and finally mirroring fragments, Richter generated a massive 4,096 strips. Working with film-maker Corinna Belz, they produced a gorgeous kaleidoscopic feast: an odyssey of patterns moving seamlessly across the screen, creating hypnotic and 3D effects referencing the colour palette of Middle Eastern and southern European palaces. Turmeric yellows, crimson reds, intense fuchsias, celestial purples, intense oranges and teasing teals appear variously in patterns which morph gradually from one shape to another, and at times even appear to take on almost human form, standing atop one another. The vibrancy and depth of the artwork is striking.

Theun Mosk’s set design for this current Dutch production (which premiered in 2023) is markedly different from the New York premiere and later performances in London. Acknowledging concerns regarding the seating position of musicians, Mosk places them behind a specially created acoustic transparent screen which allows their sound to travel through the screen and hit the audience from all angles, not dissimilar to a cinematic experience.

If the first half which was all about the music and the intense effort exerted by the musicians to perform with such precision, now, with musicians out of view, Reich’s largely consonant and highly accessible musical language in the masterful hands of Currie and Asko|Schöberg, was about the listener. The combined offering creates the space to let the mind wander, to evoke and stimulate memories, and to give the listener space to explore these thoughts in a manner we have become unaccustomed to in our busy 21st-century lives. By not overwhelming audiences with catchy tunes and huge emotional intensity, individuals were free to interpret the result in a highly personalised manner. Roll on the 2026 Minimal Music full edition.