Anyone who went to bed late last night probably did so with One, two, three, four. These are the days, my friend running through their head. Yesterday, that radical score came alive again at NTGent. Moor Mother, Ictus and Collegium Vocale Gent, under the direction of Tom De Cock, carried a full house through more than three hours of counting, voices, repetition and gradual change. Keyboards laid down a relentless rhythmic grid, brass and woodwinds cut through it, and voices moved between human breath and mechanical precision. The whole building seemed to pulse along. In the hall, eyes closed. Time did strange things.

Almost fifty years after the premiere of Einstein on the Beach, it's clear how little grip time has on Philip Glass's masterpiece. While the world and technology raced ahead at lightning speed over that half century, Einstein kept counting, pulsing, repeating and shifting. And it still sounds like something we need to catch up with. Moor Mother, extraordinarily strong, worked from the existing libretto, but her voice and energy made the rhythm elastic. She stretched it out, pushed against it, and brought a different America into the score. Perhaps that was the most remarkable thing of all: how a work from 1976 can effortlessly pull generations, young and even younger, into the same cadence. For a moment, NTGent felt like its own spaceship, with its own laws and its own time. It was almost a shock to find ourselves back in the foyer at the end of the night.

Photos: Björn Comhaire