Music review: Reich/Glass

GLASGOW Concert Halls' Minimal Festival – a three-day celebration of minimalism in a broad-based context – ended on Sunday with head-to-head programming of two of the movement's most prominent founders and protagonists, Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

The main feature – Philip Glass's Icarus at the Edge of Time – the result of a collaboration between Glasgow Concert Halls and a number of international commissioning partners – brought together the artistic team of Glass, physicist and children's writer Brian Greene, playwright David Henry Hwang, and film-makers AL+AL to create a multimedia tale of space travel and black holes, narrated by Scots actor Billy Boyd.

The first performance of the afternoon, containing only the Glass, was intended specifically for a family audience. And once again it featured the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Swiss conductor Baldur Bronnimann, who served up the heavily laden score with brittle efficiency.

Glass's music works best in a soundtrack context, its acres of repetition helpful in underpinning a storyline – Icarus, a young space traveller, yearns to play chicken with a black hole and finds himself transported 10,000 years into the future – that toys with the vagaries of time versus gravity. The slick animation gave credibility to the music.

Three of Reich's famous Counterpoints, which call on solo performers to integrate live with their own prerecords, were also presented with film accompaniment – simple metamorphosing geometric, but ultimately passive images.

Irish violinist Darragh Morgan in the early 1960s Violin Phase, guitarist Alan Neave in Electric Counterpoint and SCO flautist Alison Mitchell in Vermont Counterpoint all gave fresh, vital life to these energised examples of pure minimalism.