The Colin Currie Group made a smart curatorial bet for this 90th-birthday programme: skip Music for 18 Musicians and Drumming, trust the audience with the composer's later work, and see what happens. What happens, it turns out, is that Reich's final decades look considerably stronger than his reputation for them suggests. The evening found its footing after a tentative opening, settling into four consecutive works that made a strong case for Reich's post-2000 output. Radio Rewrite — five continuous movements built on harmonic shadows of Radiohead's Everything in Its Right Place and Electric Counterpoint — is as cool as anything in the catalogue. The Radiohead DNA surfaces not as quotation but as atmosphere: a lyrical outline in the faster sections, a harmonic temperature in the slow ones. Currie's reading was relaxed and exact. Double Sextet, the Pulitzer winner, followed. The piece is a mechanical marvel — two identical six-piece ensembles playing in and out of phase, generating what Reich calls 'resultant patterns,' melodies that emerge from the interlocking texture like shapes in a magic-eye print. The Colin Currie Group's discipline was impeccable, though the reviewer notes the two sextets could have used more physical separation on stage to help the ear track which ensemble was which. Quartet opened the second half with what the review rightly calls 'panther-like grace' — Currie and Owen Gunnell trading phrases on duelling vibraphones, the texture stripped to its bones. It's Reich at his most exposed, and it holds. But the programme's final card was In All Your Ways, a London premiere and the work of a composer in his tenth decade. Written for 16 instruments — two each of pianos, vibraphones, and marimbas, the percussion trinity Reich has trusted for 50 years — it's described here as a 'bedazzling song without words.' The title is drawn from Proverbs 3:5-6, and the text supplies not content but rhythm: a syllabic pattern that the ensemble turns and turns, cartwheeling through the texture. The surprise is the sense of freedom inside what sounds, on paper, like a rigidly systematic process. The music morphs and insists and reflects in ways that feel unscripted even when they're not. The Barbican's Steve Reich at 90 series continues until May, and if this programme is representative, it's worth attending for the late work specifically. The birthday concerts elsewhere this year reportedly leaned on the canonical 70s and 80s pieces. This one trusted that Reich kept going — and proved it was right to.
