Reich’s particular skill as a Minimalist composer is his ability to continuously shed new light on the same, apparently simple material. This necessarily means that his music unfurls gradually, at once reflective and revelatory, unified and fluid. The same thing could also be said of his development as a composer. Throughout his career Reich has maintained a fundamental interest: to spotlight the very processes that give each piece its overall form – whether that be phasing, variations, augmentation, etc. – making them the ends as well as the means. At the same time, he has continuously found new, ever more subtle ways to express this. Tonight’s concert offers a birds-eye view of that ‘gradual process’, with works stretching from his early years as a member of the New York counterculture to the large-scale orchestral pieces of the 1980s and beyond …