Kings Place, London
Depending on where you attach the label of the first minimalist piece – this compendious first programme in the Kings Place series placed it on Terry Riley's tape piece Mescaline Mix (1961), which is equally an example of musique concrète – musical minimalism has been around for five decades now, infiltrating all genres from opera to symphony to rock, as well as garnering dozens of practitioners and countless admirers. The overall thesis – that minimalism represented the last great musical revolution of the 20th century – seems unarguable, and even if this particular concert focusing on the style's antecedents, as well as including a couple of new works, was overstuffed with items, it made its point.
The series also centres on the piano duo of Katia and Marielle Labèque, heard individually, together, and in combination with other performers. Not all of their playing was ideally clear or poised. Laideronnette from Ravel's Mother Goose Suite – the most debatable inclusion in terms of the theme, but a central piece in the Labèques' duo repertory – needed brighter, cleaner colours and a tighter ensemble. A genuine minimalist masterpiece, Steve Reich's 1967 Piano Phase, which Katia Labèque performed with Nicola Tescari at the second piano, too often drifted out of synch.
Tescari as composer contributed one of the new pieces, his Suonar Remembrando Chaconne, a freewheeling digression on a piece by the Italian Renaissance master Tarquinio Merula; Massimo Pupillo's Sulphur and Mercury, referencing John Cage's early pieces for prepared piano, was the other. In both, Katia Labèque was joined by a small rock ensemble, though neither work left a solid impression. What did, and could have constituted the second half on its own, was a lengthy realisation of Terry Riley's protean In C, a work of genuine historical importance that maintained its dizzying momentum as the evening's largest-scale offering.