Steve Reich/Philip Glass Ensemble, Royal Festival Hall, review Wherever there are superpowers, there is cold war. Somehow, though, the Southbank Centre managed to keep the peace at its weekend-long exploration of modern American music, entitled Superpower 1960-2000 and presented as the latest instalment of its The Rest is Noise festival. This despite the fact that its two stars, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, who have long feuded over their roles in the early history of minimalism, were both in town, presumably hiding from each other under their baseball caps. The concert had opened with some brief highlights from the Reich catalogue. Clapping Music found the composer on stage with his now close collaborator, Colin Currie, who in turn led members of his ensemble through Music for Pieces of Wood, one of Reich's works with roots in African music. There was room, too, for protest art in the boldly worked tape loops of the Civil Rights-era Come Out, and humour in the art-installation-like Pendulum Music. Humour was one of the things missing the previous evening from Glass's magnum opus Music in 12 Parts, an almost four-hour encyclopedia of his technique as it stood in the early Seventies. This harmonically static music retains a sort of purity, it is true. As Andrew Porter wrote when the music was still fresh, when a new sound does break in, the effect is "as if the wall of a room has suddenly disappeared, to reveal a completely new view." In this coarsely amplified performance by the Philip Glass Ensemble, too much detail was lost and the result was the aural equivalent of brown rice wrapped in candyfloss. Yet, with three of the seven musicians here (including Glass himself) being veterans of the 1974 premiere, the performance at least came with a sense of history. In minimalist music, it's not only the notes that are repeated, but history itself.