© Marco Borggreve
Colin Currie: Percussion
Cowdray Hall
Thursday 23 October 2014
Aberdeen University Music in association with sound
by Alan Cooper
Aberdeen University Music in tandem with sound welcomed back percussion wizard Colin Currie for a solo performance that easily drew a full house to the Cowdray Hall on Thursday. We were about to enjoy an astonishing display of virtuosity, wonderful to watch as well as to hear in six contemporary percussion compositions. These included the Scottish premiere of Realisimos magicos, a new work by Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin, co-commissioned by sound along with Wigmore Hall and the Bergen Festival. Familiar instruments like marimba, vibraphone and drum kits were at the heart of the performance along with a couple of thoroughly intriguing items. There was a long metal tongue, like part of a machine spring that added a special new voice to the cymbal sounds and then an amazing looking bamboo shaker, apparently called an angklung, an instrument from South-East Asia, that Currie near shook the life out of at one point in Per Nørgård’s Fire over Water. Different kinds of beaters in a variety of combinations altered the voices of marimba, vibes and drums in fascinating ways and two of the works in the programme, Anna Clyne’s TheSecret Garden and Dave Maric’s Sense & Innocence used pre-recorded electronically sculpted soundtracks along with Colin Currie’s perfectly integrated live performances.
Anna Clyne’s Secret Garden was inspired by lines taken from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s novel The Secret Garden. The text had been pre-recorded by Colin Currie himself and then altered and shaped to special musical effect by the composer. Marimba sounds had been used to create an impressive backwash of sound that at times even suggested a cathedral organ. The first choice of text recurred throughout the piece, broken up or repeated perhaps as a baroque composer might use repetition of the text. The full text as printed in the programme actually summed up a major part of the story with the idea of the dead garden coming back to life but the combination of the pre-recording and the live drumkit or marimba created a fascinating atmospheric collage of sound pictures that gave the back story a special new intensity. Frances Hodgson Burnett died in New York in 1924. I wonder how she would have reacted to the new infusion of life that Anna Clyne has given to her story.
Colin Currie asked the audience to accept the next three pieces as a kind of unified suite. I thought the different compositions worked together rather well in this format. Elliot Carter’s Figment V on marimba was as Colin Currie said a short fanfare of a piece with the notes bouncing hither and thither. The programme note described it as “a sonic pinball machine” and I cannot think of a better description.
The central part of the suite was supplied by Per Nørgård’s Fire over Water in several ways the best and most exciting part of the suite. Colin Currie excelled with a high speed virtuoso assault on a set of tom toms with bass drum and cymbals and high intensity use of foot-pedals as well as sticks. A couple of sweeps of a bell tree took us on to the softer tuned percussion sounds of vibes then the angklung acted as the second punctuation that nearly burst into flames taking us back to the tom toms.
Toshio Hosokawa’s Reminiscence gave us a softer hypnotic ending to this wonderful triptych of pieces from around the world, representing USA, Denmark and Japan.
Dave Maric’s Sense & Innocence used tuned percussion with high pitched bowed sounds mirrored in live performance against sounds derived from the same instruments. I was fascinated by the ways in which timbres or rhythms were skilfully employed so that there was always a match between the live and recorded performances.
The final piece was the Scottish premiere of the specially commissioned work by Rolf Wallin. The titles of the eleven short pieces for marimba were taken from the writings of Gabriel Garcia Márquez. The literary referencing harked back in a sense to the opening work though both author and music were entirely different. This set of pieces was, as Colin Currie said, a very welcome addition to the repertoire for marimba. Here the varied use of different sticks or beaters came into its own. I particularly liked The Night of the Curlews and the two sections entitled Light is like Water. Colin Currie’s playing made absolute sense of this strange statement. I also found The Shortest Story in the World superbly amusing. These were the sorts of pieces you would want to hear again and again and with each listening you would come across something new.
