Coliseum; Royal Festival Hal; Wigmore Hall; Barbican, London
Minimalism becomes spectacle in ENO’s entrancing Philip Glass revival, while many hands make hypnotically light work of Steve Reich
Two giants of American minimalism bestrode the Thames on consecutive nights last week. Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (1984), the last of his trilogy of “portrait” operas, returned to English National Opera in Phelim McDermott’s preposterously gorgeous, must-see production, new in 2016. Across the river, Steve Reich’s epic Music for 18 Musicians (1976), attracted a capacity audience to the Royal Festival Hall.
Over half a century since its origins in New York in the 1960s (the story is more complicated, but that’s for the lecture room), minimalist music still provokes a lingering fury from those who resist its aesthetic of repetition. The rest of us can unite, quite cheerfully, a fascination with phasing (patterns united and dividing at steady but different pulses) with a taste for the goal-oriented music of Beethoven and Wagner or, at the other extreme, the complexities of Boulez, who refused to do anything twice.
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