The Desert Music, which formed the second half of the London Symphony Orchestra's contribution to Phases, the Barbican's extensive celebration of Steve Reich's 70th birthday, has been through several incarnations. At its first performance in 1984, a vast orchestra and an amplified chorus of 27 were employed. By the following year, the piece had been downsized to chamber ensemble plus 10 singers. More recently, the conductor Alan Pierson devised new brass parts for this latter version that were used by the LSO on this occasion.

While composers often revise works, the repeated revisiting of the scoring of this piece suggests an underlying unhappiness with the original's symphonic scale. In its current form, the textures at least remain clear, which cannot be said of the first item on the programme, the Three Movements, in which the lucid lines Reich favours in smaller-scale pieces seem to have furred up.

The young Chinese conductor Xian Zhang maintained a purposeful approach to both scores, obtaining a finely disciplined account from the LSO musicians and Synergy Vocals, the specialist amplified singing group delivering William Carlos Williams's poems, though Reich's settings rarely allow the words to come through. Those parts of the texts' imagery dealing with the implications of nuclear threat were hinted at in the video accompaniment to the piece supplied by D-Fuse, whose subtly mutating abstract patterns were perfectly synchronised with Reich's own shifting harmonic shapes and morphing repetitions. In fact, the piece's impact arguably benefited from these visual additions.

In between the two Reich works came The Rite of Spring, with the LSO on flamboyant form, both individually and collectively, in this anything-but-routine showpiece. The clarity of Zhang's direction was again an asset. She whipped up a firestorm for the Dance of the Earth, but, as in Reich's Three Movements, the quiet sections needed more momentum.