Reich, Glass, Nancarrow et al performed by London Sinfonietta (BBC Proms 2020)

A programme of "pulsing cityscapes" from the London Sinfonietta, recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall sans audience on Tuesday 1 September.  Some wonderful, ear-bending sounds came out of this - as soon as the stately chords of Glass' Facades fade away, what comes next is a miniature for toy piano and toy boombox.  This piece is East Broadway by Julia Wolfe, one of the Bang On A Can founders - after her grand epic Flower Power earlier this year, it was nice to hear the contrast of something so brief and bizarre.

Orchestral arrangements of two of Conlon Nancarrow's Studies For Player Piano follow, with the expanded instrumentation really highlighting the fiendish complexity of Nancarrow's writing.  A spotlight for three more contemporary composers is next, with Tansy Davies' funk-influenced Neon, Edmund Finnis' renaissance/baroque-cut-and-paste In Situ and Anna Meredith's distorted bassoon piece Axeman.  The finale is Steve Reich's City Life, which more than ably demonstrates its title in the trademark pulse and orchestration, and in the sampled sounds from the streets of NYC.  These include voices used both in the style of Different Trains, where the cadence of the speech informs the melody, and in phased overlays like his early work Come Out.

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