Steve Reich at 80

The LSO mark the 80th birthday of one of classical music’s greatest living pioneers, American composer Steve Reich, with a concert featuring three of his most significant scores.

Reich’s multi-faceted compositional voice is one of the most distinctive in contemporary music today and is presented in this concert in all its guises, from pulsing and rhythmic to reflective and lyrical.

The first half of the evening’s programme features a pair of kaleidoscopic works for ensemble and voices, Reich’s You Are (Variations) and Daniel Variations, both of which consist of a series of increasingly embellished variations which form around terse fragments of text. The concert closes with Reich’s The Desert Music, a work on a monumental scale for chorus and extended orchestra which depicts the vast and ever shifting landscape of a scorched desert.

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