The closing concert of the Belfast Festival was a celebration of minimalism and its legacies, culminating in a rare performance of Steve Reich's biggest orchestral piece, The Desert Music. Conductor Thierry Fischer led the Ulster Orchestra and National Chamber Choir and revealed the strengths of this underrated work, even if he couldn't disguise the challenges it poses for any interpreters.
The stumbling block for many performances is that The Desert Music demands the rhythmic clarity and focus of Reich's chamber pieces but on a vaster scale. Hearing the delicate counterpoint between repeated musical patterns is one thing in an ensemble of six pianos, but it's something else when you're dealing with an orchestra of 80. But the Ulster players made the dense textures of the opening part sound luminous and coherent, and they built up a dramatic sequence of chromatic chords, underpinned by the unstable bass lines that Reich writes for the low strings and brass players.
The problems began when the National Chamber Choir joined the orchestra. The Desert Music sets poems by William Carlos Williams, each a pithy aphorism that uncannily evokes Reich's own aesthetics: "It is a principle of music to repeat the theme. Repeat and repeat again, as the pace mounts." Thanks to some underpowered sound diffusion, the choir's words were scarcely audible above the players, ruining the impact of Reich's subtle word setting. However, in the middle of the piece - which is constructed in a gigantic arch form, so that the final two parts mirror the first two - there were some passages that were genuinely affecting. Reich isn't known as a musical pictorialist, but the strange, clockwork-like textures he built up underneath Williams' text about the dangers of nuclear power were evocative and moving. Even if the Ulster Orchestra's ensemble was occasionally ragged, and Fischer was not always able to hold his massed forces together, this was an invigorating performance.
The Desert Music was in another league of musical quality from ex-Police guitarist Andy Summers' and classical guitarist Benjamin Verdery's European premiere of Ingram Marshall's double guitar concerto, Dark Florescence. The piece attempted to fuse Balinese modes, electric guitar solos, and minimalist riffs but was an overlong, over-indulgent mess that made 20 minutes seem like an eternity.
