EIF music reviews: Colin Currie Group Plays Steve Reich | RÓIS

Colin Currie Group Plays Steve Reich ★★★★★

Usher Hall

You’d be forgiven for assuming that, at the age of 89 (90 in October), iconic US minimalist composer Steve Reich might be content to trot out more of the same in his immediately distinctive style. Not at all.

In All Your Ways, written earlier this year as an EIF co-commission and given its very first performance by the Colin Currie Group, is the music of a composer entirely comfortable in his sound world, but also out to defy expectations, subvert assumptions, and have a lot of fun doing so.

It’s a substantial, 20-minute piece – for pairs of pianos, vibraphones, marimbas, flutes and clarinets plus string quartet – and Reich sometimes employs his ensemble as almost a miniature orchestra, varying textures and sonic density playfully as the music develops across its kaleidoscopic harmonic worlds, skittering equally playfully up and down tempos through a mischievous series of metric modulations.

It was music that was always on the way somewhere, and took a lot of sonic delight in getting there, even if its ever-changing rhythms and tempos set considerable challenges to Currie as conductor – which he more that rose to in a buoyant and unfailingly nimble account.

As the climax to a concert devoted (mainly) to Reich’s more recent works – given universally crisp, committed performances – In All Your Ways was joyfully inventive, youthfully witty and – in its own way – quietly radical too. David Kettle

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RÓIS ★★★

The Hub

Heralded by echoing angelus chimes and electronic murmurs, RÓIS , her face black-veiled, stood by a console on a darkened stage, drummer and guitarist (also masked) confined to the shadows, and started crooning What Do You Say, then ululated into an octave-leaping anguished shriek.

RÓIS, aka Rose Connolly from Fermanagh, is an award-winning singer steeped in Irish traditional song and particularly the ancient funeral traditions of keening, as well as wider traditions of Irish Catholic culture – hence the tolling of the angelus that punctuates her performance.

She can sing, delicately, in a melismatic Irish sean-ós style, as she did at one point, but most of the time, her vocals were couched in kaleidoscopic soundscapes of samples and booming electronica.

The old Wesleyan hymn Oh Lovely Appearance of Death gave way to Caoine – keening – her full-voiced delivery escalating again into a howl, at times reminiscent of Sami joik singing, again with astonishing octave leaps. At one point she left her console to become a hollering black spectre gyrating about the stage, while drums and guitar crashed in a distinct whiff of heavy metal Hallowe’en.

As “experimental folk” it was all ineffably weird and indubitably striking, but is the mask symbolism or mere gimmickry – and why the noise levels. Jim Gilchrist

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