Tag Archives: Colin Currie

EIF: Colin Currie Group / Gesualdo Six

Posted on by

Usher Hall/Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

The BBC Proms marks the 90th birthday of American composer Steve Reich tomorrow with a late night concert that teams Owain Park’s superb vocal ensemble Gesualdo Six with the Colin Currie Group. As with the Berlin Philharmonic, whose two programmes in the Royal Albert Hall this week were earlier played at the Festival’s closing weekend, EIF can claim to have heard them first.

In the cases of Currie’s Group and Park’s choir, however, the Edinburgh performances were even more notable, with first and early performances of brand new works.

Colin Currie’s way with the works of Steve Reich have the enthusiastic approval of the composer himself, and the Usher Hall programme presented half a dozen of them in what was an important contribution to the Festival’s USA250 “All Rise” theme as well as to Reich’s birthday celebrations.

The composer’s music was being played in Lucerne the same evening, but it was Edinburgh that had the new work, a world premiere of In All Your Ways, for string quartet, pairs of pianos, flutes and clarinets and four percussionists.

It completed a programme that saw Currie mostly in the conductor’s role, although it began with Clapping Music (from distant 1972) performed by himself and Owen Gunnell, and as fine an opener as it makes an encore.

It was followed by 2020’s Two Pianos, the players being Philip Moore, perhaps best known for his two-piano partnership with Simon Crawford-Phillips, and Siwan Rhys, half of the GBSR duo with percussionist George Barton, who made a memorable contribution to this year’s Tectonics weekend in Glasgow City Hall.

Although they were necessarily at the back of the platform and almost invisible to many of the audience, the pulse they established and querulous ending of the short work set things up for the ensemble music that followed.

Radio Rewrite added Pete Wilson’s electric bass to the string quartet, single winds, piano and percussion line-up, for the most pulsating score of the programme. It becomes much sparer and slower in the two movements that draw on the early Radiohead song Everything in its Right Place, the other three referencing the same group’s later Jigsaw Falling into Place.

That source material undoubtedly brought Reich a new audience, and may well have contributed to the good attendance at the Usher Hall, but familiarity with Radiohead’s music is far from necessary to enjoyment of what is one of the composer’s most accessible pieces of music.

The two large works on either side of the interval were also Reich classics, and these performances were masterly. The mirrored set-up of Double Sextet (2007), with the two groups of piano, tuned percussion, flute, clarinet, cello and violin (the leaders being Jonathan Morton and Clio Gould) was a visual as well as aural pleasure – enhanced, perhaps coincidentally, by the precise gender-balance in this group of musicians.

The dialogue between strings and winds in the work was meticulously directed and beautifully balanced by Currie, and the two pianists put in an extraordinary shift over its 20 minutes or so.

For Quartet (2013), after the interval, they were joined by Gunnell and Currie, the latter picking up mallets for the only time of the evening. The dynamic empathy between the four, the cross-stage conversations and building intensity at the finale, marked out another brilliant example of the composer’s unique voice.

In All Your Ways turned out to be something of a departure from that, especially in its opening and closing phases. More lyrical than even the gentler moments of Double Sextet, it also seemed more wide-screen in its use of the instruments, that familiar palette of sounds used in a different way. It is another work of scale, at 20 minutes, and a further opportunity to hear it is undoubtedly necessary before it finds its proper place in the Reich canon.

Gesualdo Six (photo: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

The previous weekend at EIF had seen Gesualdo Six bring to the Queen’s Hall chamber music programme a performance that transcended that slot while fitting rather perfectly in the space.

Death of Gesualdo is a follow-up to Secret Byrd, which has been seen at the Lammermuir Festival and, just this year, at Perth Festival of the Arts. The six singers are once again working with Concert Theatre Works and director Bill Barclay, and on this occasion with six actors and a puppeteer.

That title undersells the narrative, which covers the composer’s entire life as well as his extraordinary demise and the most notorious incident of his existence, when he caught his first wife with her lover and murdered them both.

The soundtrack for all this is his own music, very cleverly (if arguably slightly blasphemously) re-purposed so that liturgical texts refer to his own betrayal and sacrifice. It was immaculately sung by the costumed choristers, whose blend and precision pitch were a marvel, even as they added performance skill and lighting duties to their practice.

The mime and tableau vivant of the actors was also quite compelling, modern naturalistic techniques and movement sitting alongside Victorian melodrama gestures, and the puppet of the composer as a boy, in a mix that seems to match the period of the music perfectly. It is exquisitely costumed, and staged in a way clearly designed to fit the smallest playing area.

Just as the music reflected back on itself, so the human animation found scenic echoes in the narrative of Gesualdo’s life in a production that deserves to be even more widely seen than its predecessor. It visits Snape Maltings, the Canterbury Festival and Southampton next month (Oct 18, 19 & 20) and will return to St Martin-in-the-Fields, who co-commissioned it, in March.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

SCO / Currie: Steve Reich+

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

The magic of modern musical minimalism lies in its simplistic repetition, organic gear shifts, and compulsive rhythmic propulsion from which springs an addictive Rock-style tension and, in the best examples, a transcendent euphoria. The fathers of that invention were, of course, the American minimalists, among them Steve Reich, whose music was the nucleus of this latest SCO New Dimensions programme – Steve Reich+ – curated and directed by star Scots percussionist Colin Currie.

Who better to engage with Reich’s music than Currie, whose longterm performance association with the now 89-year-old composer has given him a first-hand insight that set the second half of this concert ablaze? It included Runner, dating from 2016, and the earlier Double Sextet of 2002, both as fascinating to the eye as to the ear, given their stereophonic use of mirrored ensembles. 

Currie’s innate rhythmic presence as a percussionist proved the perfect credentials for invigorating these relatively late pieces, both of which lean to the Reich of old – edgy, motorised impetus heightened by cellular organic transformation – yet harness moments of softened, more reflective charm. 

The more heavily-scored Runner, an evolving play on different note durations, benefitted from a vitally sustained performance, rich in textural ingenuity and contrast, compulsive in its unstoppable drive to the finish. If the outer sections of the Double Sextet preserved the mechanistic excitement, with notably virtuosic elan, the ghostly reveries of the calming central movement took us to another, more introspective world. But only briefly.

This being a New Dimensions programme, Currie turned his attention in the first half to younger compositional voices – also friends of his – whose representative works owed varying indebtedness to Reich. First up was Joe Duddell’s Snowblind, the only work of the evening in which Currie jointly functioned as soloist. 

Written originally in 2001 for the former BT Scottish Ensemble, much of it oozes Reichian DNA, the moto perpetuo marimba-led dynamism of the opening Vivace dizzyingly incessant, the final moments equally so after the woozy pseudo-Baroque pastoralism of the central Lento. It wasn’t always the tidiest of performances, and there is something very Tippett-like in Duddell’s writing – a kind of self-effacing intangibility – that felt frustratingly incomplete.

Not so Helen Grime’s River, this being the UK premiere of a work first performed in 2023 by the Staatsorchester Hamburg in its wonderful riverside concert hall. From the very outset, Currie capitalised on the fuller colour spectrum and textural flexibility explored by Grime in her vivid soundscape. From rapid watery flurries to milky calms, spectral luminescence to dark undercurrents, and a final swirling representation of the river’s passage to the sea (signing off with a tangible nod to Britten’s Peter Grimes), this may have been the most un-Reichian music of the evening, but in spirit it certainly played its part.

Ken Walton

SCO / Emelyanychev & RSNO / Sondergard

Posted on by

Usher Hall, Edinburgh / Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra entitled the opening of its new season From Darkness to Light and that idea was just as audible in the concerts that began the seasons of both the BBC SSO and the RSNO.

At Glasgow City Halls the previous week, it was undoubtedly behind the celebratory strings of Ryan Wigglesworth’s tribute to the SSO’s former leader Laura Samuel, and applied just as well to the trajectory of Schumann’s Violin Concerto, as performed by Daniel Lozakovich.

In the SCO programme it clearly worked for both the opening and closing works. The famous fate motif that opens Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was predictably not laboured by Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev in a pacy and detailed interpretation of the work, following on from a much-lauded BBC Proms performance. It was in the transition from the Scherzo to the finale that the sense of emerging into brightness was most obvious, but this was a far-from-simplistic reading of the symphony with refreshing changes of power and tone in the slow movement as well as in the unfolding of its conclusion.

The concert had begun with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen in a compact and intense version that was truly “chamber” music, with some excellent solo playing from the string front desks and carefully controlled ensemble that always kept a little in reserve. It was a performance that is well worth listening out for when the BBC recording is broadcast.

So too, it hardly needs saying, is the orchestra’s playing of Veni, Veni Emmanuel with soloist Colin Currie, even if the trajectory of the piece arguably defies the Darkness-to-Light equation. Currie must have given a fair proportion of the remarkable number of performances MacMillan’s early percussion concerto has enjoyed since the SCO premiered it with Evelyn Glennie at the 1992 Proms.

It is still one of the most thrilling works in the composer’s now extensive catalogue, and it was good to be reminded that the brasher music is more than balanced with much gentler, melodic, and equally virtuosic, music. The closing bars, when the soloist moved to tubular bells at the back of the stage and the whole orchestra adding tinkling percussion was movingly evocative of the Ascension, so perhaps the SCO’s concert title did work here as well.

‘From darkness to light’ is only one interpretation of the complexity of Mahler’s Symphony No.7, the major work of the RSNO’s season-opener as Music Director Thomas Sondergard continued his commitment to a full cycle of the composer’s symphonies. It’s a valid one, nonetheless, and the conductor certainly suggested as much in his dynamic marshalling of the large orchestra through its long structure. The two Nachtmusik movements emerged especially well, the horn calls in the former, and the sequence of solos – violin, guitar, mandolin and oboe among them – in the latter beautifully calibrated.

There is much operatic about the work’s conclusion, and Sondergard was in his element with the theatrical changes of pace leading up to the dramatic bells that also punctuate this work’s ending.

In a great run of concert openers, the RSNO began its season with Oliver Knussen’s terrific miniature, Flourish with Fireworks, which has long transcended its specific commission by the LSO at the end of the 1980s to become an emblem of the composer’s infectious enthusiasm.

The concerto that followed was Ravel’s in G Major with Francesco Piemontesi the perfect partnership soloist, embracing his dialogues with orchestra members and as eloquent in the lush Romanticism of the central Adagio as in the more 20th century jazzy rhythms of the contrasting outer movements.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Martin Shields

EIF: Colin Currie / King’s Singers

Posted on by

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

In his early days, James MacMillan looked up to Steve Martland, a slightly older composer whose hard-edged style (and thorny politics) appealed to the young MacMillan seeking to hone his own identifiable voice in the 1980s. Fast forward forty years and the presence of a saucy new MacMillan commission within a programme designed around Martland’s belligerent Street Songs was – for those of us old enough to remember – a pertinent reminder of that influential link.

Of course, Martland is no longer with us – he died 12 years ago at the too-early age of 58 – so these performances by percussionist Colin Currie (on marimba) and The King’s Singers, signalling the start of the Edinburgh International Festival’s Queen’s Hall series, were strikingly nostalgic. 

The four songs – Poor Roger, Green Gravel, Jenny Jones and Oranges and Lemons – may not be Martland’s most consistently riveting pieces, but there’s no mistaking the combative, mischievous minimalism underpinning them that was once the feisty hallmark of the “bad boy” composer and his eponymous hi-energy band, of which Currie himself was a member.

Add to that The King’s Singers’ championing of the Street Songs (originally performed and recorded late last century with Evelyn Glennie) and Currie’s own five-year association with the legendary vocal group, and the connective potential of Saturday’s line-up was plain to see.

Poor Roger, with its multi-layered “Hippety Hops”, wasted no time in charging the atmosphere, the marimba’s muted insistence a kinetic dynamo to the Singers’ nimble acrobatics. Before the hypnotic freneticism of Green Gravel, Stanley Glasser’s Zulu-inspired Lala Mntwana offered a moment of sweetness and repose. The ensuing step back in time – to the haunting 17th century motet, Death Hath Deprived Me, of Thomas Weelkes – served its purpose in setting the mood and context for Roderick Williams’ contemporary response to that very composer, his own Death, Be Not Proud, rearranged for this programme for singers and marimba. 

This performance captured well the tempered anguish, neatly calibrated dissonance and expressive gestures of Williams’ poignant homage. Its final moments, like a ghostly reference to the original Weelkes, were strikingly reminiscent – and just as effective – as the plaintive homecoming ending achieved by Britten in his magical Lacrymae. 

The soft pop ballad Alive, by Brighton-born composer Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, offered a momentary glimpse of the old Saturday Night TV King’s Singers’ sound, itself a perfect way in to MacMillan’s A Bunch o’ Craws, a hilarious and virtuosic skit on the children’s ditty “Three Craws Sat Upon a Wa’”. With seven “craws” now in on the action (including a spoof vocal contribution from Currie) the focus was on quick fire entertainment, and a Glaswegian patois –  including the well-worn Taggart cliché “There’s been a murder!” – from the singers that would easily have passed muster in Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night. When MacMillan lets his hair down like this he proves himself an absolute master of his craft.

The second half completed the Martland sequence – an a cappella Jenny Jones that occasional sagged intonation-wise, and the versatile play-acting of Oranges and Lemons. It also brought us the sultry, atmospheric South African story-telling of Peter Louis van Dijk’s Horizons, sung, clapped and finger-clicked to haunting effect.

Missy Mazzoli’s Year of Our Burning, written in 2021 in response to the pandemic offered another “world premiere arrangement”, which lived more for its precious moments than as a convincing whole. So, too, Bryce Dessner’s Tromp Miniature for solo marimba had more an air of background music than anything more compelling. 

Compelling is exactly what’s needed in any encore, which Joe Duddell’s arrangement of Everything Everything’s I Want A Love Like This delivered to an audience hot for more. Martland, one sensed, would no doubt have approved.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Jess Shurte Photography)

BBC SSO / Gerts

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

At the end of the week when the BBC Scottish announced a new Principal Guest Conductor in Delyana Lazarova, we should have been seeing her predecessor in the post, Ilan Volkov, back on the podium. When Volkov called off for personal reasons, his replacement was Estonian Mihhail Gerts, taking over a challenging programme in its entirety.

At its heart was the UK premiere of Trurliade – Zone Zero (Relief méta-sonore), a half-hour concerto for solo percussion and orchestra by Austrian iconoclast Olga Neuwirth, with local hero Colin Currie the soloist. On either side of that, Prokofiev, his youthful Autumnal Sketch opening the programme and the highly personal, sombre Sixth Symphony filling the second half.

Gerts dealt superbly with that huge challenge. The concerto is as far from being solely in the hands of the soloist as is possible, frantically busy though Currie was. The percussion work in the orchestra was not just in the hands of a six-string section, but also the wind and string players in the use of extended techniques and toys and small instruments.

The conductor kept everything on track with a strict time baton and eloquent, precise left hand cueing, steering a path through a score that sometimes sounded chaotic but is brilliantly structured. The soloist’s initial rubbing and scraping of a hanging gong, crashing of cymbals and thumping of an oil drum was answered by brass interjections and hunting horn calls, those orchestral percussionists adding masses of extra colour.

With two paper copies of the score as well as a tablet computer, Currie dashed between three set-ups on the apron of the stage, and many more instruments – untuned and tuned – than it was possible to count. Yet it was quite possible to forget to watch him because of everything else that was going on in a huge orchestra, augmented with Wagner tubas, contrabass clarinet and tenor saxophone.

The music was constantly changing, sometimes racing away before doubling back on itself, sometimes incremental in pitch and time, throwing out fragments of unresolved melody. It is concerned with the contemporary relationship between humans and machines, both mechanical and systemic, but in a playful, cartoonish and fairground fashion. For all the fun in it, all the details are quite specific.

At its end comes a victory of sorts. After a snatch of “We Shall Overcome” on vibraphone, drum rolls from the back of the orchestra were answered by filigree decoration from the soloist, a voice boomed through a megaphone and Currie wielded an enormous mallet to thump a small cymbal.

Perhaps only a work as dark and ambiguous as Prokofiev 6 could follow that. With its ticking clock motif and clear concerns with the intimations of mortality that the composer had recently endured, it wasn’t the sort of thing Stalin wanted to hear and was banned in 1948. We don’t hear it much now either, but Gerts and the SSO gave a terrific account of the work.

The conductor was very alive to the changes of tempo in the first movement and took a very measured approach to the huge Wagnerian swoon of the Largo, keeping plenty in reserve for the pacey finale, its abrupt halt and deeply ambiguous ending.

Keith Bruce

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available to listen to for 30 days on BBC Sounds

Picture of Mihhail Gerts by Kaupo Kikkas

SCO / Currie

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

When the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was founded 50 years ago, I was but a callow youth, on rhythm guitar and vocals, with limited knowledge of orchestral music. But an evening like this one, conducted by Scottish percussionist Colin Currie, would surely have been inconceivable to those who established the SCO.

For a start, none of the repertoire we heard had yet been composed, and it is very different from the music the orchestra’s earliest concerts explored. And many in the large audience the repertoire and this soloist/conductor attracted were yet unborn.

Yet there is a clear continuum, predating the establishment of the orchestra celebrating its Golden Jubilee this year by a couple of centuries, with the virtuoso soloist directing an ensemble of instruments, even if this one included an electric bass guitar and a couple of saxophones.

Those were required as part of the fullest forces assembled onstage, for Louis Andriessen’s Tapdance, the Scottish premiere of a work composed for Currie in 2013 in which the Dutch composer expresses his love for bebop jazz – most obviously in the use of a tune by Horace Silver. The bop big band sound is only one facet of the work’s eventful quarter of an hour, however. In that section Currie was a sonic Astaire or Kelly with what appeared to be spoons instead of mallets, when he wasn’t using his hands and arms to conduct – and sometimes accomplishing both tasks at the same time.

Later he moved on to marimba, which included an exquisite solo passage, and the music became more orchestral, building to a huge climax before the conductor added glissando tympani and it ended in a very poignant, almost funereal, passage.

The concert had opened with the programme’s earliest work, Fratres by Arvo Part, that most adaptable of the Estonian’s “tintinnabula” exercises, performed here in Beat Briner’s wind octet arrangement with Currie supplying percussion. If the intonation across the winds was not absolutely true at the start, it was quickly sorted as the mesmeric quality of the piece asserted itself, and the control of the whisper-quiet horn duo at the conclusion was very impressive.

The first half ended with a work that even those who had bought a ticket mainly to hear the music after the interval probably talked about most afterwards. Julia Wolfe owes a clear debt to the propulsive music of Louis Andriessen but her Fuel, for string orchestra, upped the ante several notches. Fearsomely challenging to play, it embraces the uglier sounds bowed strings can make alongside the purest tones, and requires constant concentration combined with ferocious technique.

Currie was all over every detail of the work’s changes of pace, tempi and dynamics across – and sometimes within – the string sections, and the SCO players, led by Stephanie Gonley, were quite superb.

The composer whose name was on the evening’s ticket had the second half to himself. Currie knows the canon of Steve Reich intimately as a performer, but for these two works he was conductor only, bringing that expertise to complementary pieces from the second decade of this century.

Pulse, from 2015, might come as a surprise to those who love Reich for his minimalist repetition, highly melodic in the ensemble writing for strings and winds, but with the rhythmic consistency the title suggests in the piano and electric bass. Perhaps a less “toppy” sound on the latter would have suited the work better, and there was some inconsistency of approach in the use of vibrato in the strings, but it is a lovely lyrical piece.

The concert closed with the box-office work, Radio Rewrite, in which Reich repurposes a couple of tunes from the back-catalogue of rock group Radiohead. In fact he plays fast and loose with the songs for a piece that only ever sounds like Steve Reich, even if it was clearly a stepping-stone to the later Pulse. You can bet that Currie knows exactly where each reshaped bar and chord lies in the score though, so focussed was his direction of the musicians.

You would also put smart money on the percussionist’s debut on the podium with the SCO not being his last appearance. The orchestra’s management will be very keen to see this audience back in the City Halls of a Friday evening as regularly as Currie is himself.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Schuldt

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

Given all that has happened – or failed to happen – in recent years, it says a lot for the enthusiasm of the SCO for German conductor Clemens Schuldt that this was, by my reckoning, his fourth return visit in the past five years. By way of comparison, the soloist for this concert, Colin Currie, revealed that it was his first concert in the city since he moved back to Scotland and bought a home in Glasgow in November 2019.

Thus we have waited a long time to hear the 2018 Percussion Concerto written for him by Edinburgh-raised Helen Grime. It was a touching gesture that Currie dedicated the performance to two composers of an earlier generation – Lyell Cresswell and John McLeod – who died recently and had been an inspiration to both of them.

The work turns out to be a fascinating addition to the expanding catalogue of concertos the virtuoso percussionist has caused to be written. Rather than compose an explosive demonstration for the soloist with an accompaniment and underscore from the chamber orchestra, Grime has given Currie the lead with all the musical material – and there’s a lot of it – and invented a vast range of responses to it from the full palette of orchestral sounds at her disposal.

Currie’s “follow me” start on tuned percussion is immediately answered by slap bass and trumpet blasts and as the piece develops the percussive sounds of timpani, harp and celeste are crucial supports, as are the vibrant double bassoon, cor anglais and E flat clarinet colours in the winds.

The soloist is rarely required to hit the untuned percussion very hard, but some of the writing is very fast indeed. The third of three unseparated movements has a long marimba solo before it ends on a shimmer of glockenspiel, string harmonics and breath effects on the horns.

Grime’s radical modernity was framed by works of Beethoven, Haydn and Anton Eberl, the latter two overtures to operas about islands and women. While Eberl’s Overture to The Queen of the Black Islands made you feel you had seen the opera in its full-on drama, Haydn’s for The Uninhabited Island rather made one yearn to see a full staging of the shipwreck story.

Completing the programme was Beethoven’s Symphony No 4, a work that seems to have featured regularly in Scottish concert schedules of late. Schuldt’s version came in very clearly delineated chapters, with a very bouncy second movement Adagio and huge enthusiasm for the rhythmic games of the Scherzo. Among the fine wind solos, first bassoon Cerys Ambrose-Evans stood out.

Keith Bruce

Colin Currie and Huw Watkins

Posted on by

Perth Concert Hall

The coupling of piano and percussion is a natural one, given that part of the piano’s nature which is intrinsically percussive. That’s not to say it’s all about rhythm. As percussionist Colin Currie and pianist Huw Watkins persuasively illustrated in the last of four live audience lunchtime concerts this week in Perth Concert Hall – broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 – there is as much fun to be had exploring the combined fertile potential of their respective instruments’ melodic and timbral properties.

That they chose a virtuoso contemporary programme to make their point was to be expected. Currie has long been an exciting magnet to composers, inspiring new works in a field of instrumental music that previously had precious little in the way of quality bespoke repertoire. Watkins, besides his keyboard expertise, is one of these composers who have taken up the challenge, and it was his Seven Inventions for marimba and piano that rounded off this exceptional concert.

Written for, and premiered at, the 2019 East Neuk Festival, Watkins strikes an enticing balance between the traditional and radical. In all seven pieces, which range in mood from whispered reflection to screaming ecstasy, you sense the stabilising presence of conventional techniques – tonal sequences and regular counterpoint – yet there is a quizzical, dissonant unpredictability that gives this music a mysterious allure, not least Watkins’ teasing tendency to leave the endings hanging.

This was just one magnificent performance of several. The programme opened with Dave Maric’s Predicaments, a progression from dense blues evoked through the lower piano registers and mellow marimba, to the invigorating thrill of brighter percussion that ended in a mischievous “ting”. Watkins followed that up with Helen Grimes’ Harp of the North for solo piano, inspired by Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, as distantly atmospheric as Debussy and handled here with the utmost delicacy and, momentarily, the mildest disquiet.

The Scottish thread continued with Joe Duddell’s Parallel Lines, commissioned in 1999 by the BBC for Music Live in Glasgow, and inspired by Blondie’s 1970s’ album of the same name. The pop references sit beguilingly within a score that opens and closes with obstreperous energy, but whose central section – notable for its eerie crotales – is a disarming contrast.

Currie went solo in the penultimate performance, Tansy Davies’ ritualistic Dark Ground, which opens with the “dead sound” of the pedal bass drum. If that sounded like the typical start-up signal for an Irish marching flute band, the comparison ended there. Currie’s one-man act, on what looked like blinged-up drum kit, complete with thunder sheet, was a tour de force, a veritable showpiece in a recital that thrilled on every level.
Ken Walton

Available on BBC Sounds

BBC SSO / van Soeterstede / Currie

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

For all its negative effects, the pandemic has accelerated the careers of some musicians, and London-based Frenchwoman Chloe van Soeterstede, a product of the Royal Northern College of Music conducting course, may be one of those.

This was her second visit to the BBC Scottish in six months, after partnering cellist Steven Isserlis in a memorable programme last December. Here she was working with Colin Currie in a busy week for the Glasgow-based percussionist, on the UK premiere of the percussion concerto written for him by Dutch composer Joey Roukens.

Currie has championed many new orchestral works for his instrument(s) but this one has been a particular enthusiasm, and it is a real surprise that it has not had more international exposure. It is a full decade since he debuted it, and three years to the day since he gave an acclaimed run of three performances in Holland.

That delay in a British performance is more surprising because it a very comprehensible, and substantial, piece, in four distinct movements, each given a separate quirky title by the composer. The third of those, a syncopated “scherzo” called Protean Grooves seems to have attained something of an individual existence as a stand-alone, perhaps because it is shows the influence of guru of Dutch composition Louis Andriessen, but it works even better in the context of the whole work.

The orchestration it uses, before an extended cadenza for the soloist, is no larger than that of the substantial opening movement, Lines and Colors, which progresses through cymbals and strings through tuned percussion and winds to toms and blocks with the brass. This is big stuff, as percussion concertos need to be, but the wistful second movement, I remember this place, is a succession of gentle duets with solo instruments from the orchestra. Roukens’s tunes are slippery, but they are there, and the combination of all his skills is deployed in the finale (amusingly entitled It’s over, my friend), from the swelling marimba and clarinet opening to its querulous ending. By that point the line between the tuned and untuned instruments at Currie’s disposal was very blurred indeed, which may be exactly the intention.

If Soeterstede again proved her quality on a work that was new to her, the familiar music in the rest of the concert showed her to be thoughtful on that too. The opening of Mozart’s Don Giovanni overture was an ominous pre-echo of the Beethoven symphony that followed, and the contrast between those bars and the more “Mozartian” music that follows has rarely been as clear. The Second Symphony of Beethoven, often taken to be a minor one of the nine, was a precursor to the “Eroica” Third in her hands. Her pacing of the first movement could be thought heavy-handed, but there was no mistaking her reading of it as the anguish of a composer facing up to his deafness for the first time.

SCO: MacMillan / Currie

Posted on by

Perth Concert Hall

Two Scottish premieres provide the entrance and exit to this latest online SCO programme, once again recorded in Perth. In charge is conductor/composer Sir James MacMillan, opening with one of his own works. He’s later joined by Scots virtuoso Colin Currie in a concerto specially written for the percussionist in 2008 by the late Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. 

Both works possess an inner beauty, which gives this entire concert – Sibelius’ Suite No 2 from his characterful music for Shakespeare’s The Tempest provides a connecting bridge – a overarching aura of accessible warmth and glowing humanity. 

Originally written for string quartet, MacMillan’s short opener, Ein Lämplein verlosch (“A little lamp went out”), takes its title from the first song in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, but surely resonates as a deeply personal response to the early death several years ago of MacMillan’s own granddaughter. This enchanting performance certainly captures a spectral innocence radiating from ephemeral string harmonics, its questioning fragmentation, and a lingering sense that its feet never quite touch the ground.

When they do, briefly, there is a mixture of joy and pain, expressed with Brittenesque clarity and succinctness. MacMillan refers to it as an “instrumental distillation of this grief”, which rings very true in this nuanced performance by the SCO strings.

Nothing could be more contrasted than the huge, bulbous ripe tune that sets the ball rolling in Rautavaara’s concerto, a work subtitled Incantations. It’s as big and brassy as any west end musical signature hit, a surging wave of tonal extravagance deliberately soured by chippy dissonance. No sooner has it made its impressive presence felt than it subsidies, acting more as a blank canvas to which Currie adds spicy detail and characterisations.

Set traditionally in three movements, the opening Pesante lives up to its name, the various internal dialogues asserted by the soloist weighted by the gravitational pull of the orchestra. One brief moment, where the percussionist evokes a mood of utter serenity, forewarns of the ensuing Espressivo, a central movement whose Debussy-like opening heralds a feast of shamelessly indulgent easy listening. 

If Rautavaara’s contribution to the finale appears minimal, to some extent padding, it’s because the dominating feature is Currie’s own mammoth cadenza, as if the composer has handed over the reins and said “show us what you can do”. What transpires is both mesmerising and seamlessly integrated within the prevailing style, and heralding Rautavaara’s eventual sign-off, which is an even more colossal statement of the opening theme. It’s big, bold and conclusive, which the SCO addresses with the required chutzpah.

As for the Sibelius, MacMillan displays an obvious affinity with the unpretentiousness of this theatrically-inspired suite, eliciting the gossamer-like delicacy of the wispy Intermezzo, Grieg-like chunkiness in the brief musical portrait of Prospero, and a gorgeous Palm Court snugness in Sibelius’ magical depiction of the kind-hearted Miranda. A tad more schmalz in the Dance of the Nymphs and less constraint in the final Dance Episode is all that was needed to satisfy the wilder side of this delightful score. 
Ken Walton

Live music in Perth

Posted on by

Perth Concert Hall is setting the pace for the return of music performances before a live audience with four lunchtime concerts next week.

The diverse programme of recitals begins on Tuesday with mezzo-soprano Jess Dandy – one of the featured soloists in the venue’s Easter St Matthew Passion by Dunedin Consort – accompanied by pianist Malcolm Martineau.

Perth-raised pianist Alasdair Beatson, who recently partnered cellist Aleksei Kiseliov in an online RSNO concert, leads a piano trio in the music of Faure and Haydn the following day and saxophonist Jess Gillam plays the music of Meredith Monk, Kurt Weill, Graeme Fitkin and Astor Piazzolla on Thursday.

The sequence concludes on Friday May 28 when percussionist Colin Currie is at the marimba and Huw Watkins at the piano to play Helen Grime, Joe Duddell and Tansy Davies.

The recitals will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 as part of its Scotland Week, but crucially there are also 100 tickets available for music-lovers to attend them in person,  the first in-person concerts in the venue in over a year.

Tickets are priced at £11.50 each, including booking fee. www.horsecross.co.uk

Colin Currie

Posted on by

H K Gruber Percussion Concertos

Colin Currie Records

In many ways the most remarkable thing about the first work on this disc is that Scottish percussion virtuoso Colin Currie had nothing to do with it coming into being. Either as the commissioner or the populariser (as in his Naxos recording of James MacMillan’s Veni Veni Emmanuel), Currie has been a great expander of the repertoire of major works for his instrument. Scotland can take some pride in the contribution Evelyn Glennie and he have made to the percussion soloist’s place on the concert platform.

That does not extend to Rough Music, however, the three-movement composition that maverick Austrian H K Gruber created for a colleague in the early 1980s when he was a bass player in the same Viennese orchestra. The boom in percussion concertos that Glennie and Currie encouraged was still in the future and forty years ago orchestral works for percussion soloists were few.

Having a sparse selection of templates suits Gruber, however, whose work sounds like no-one else. With a popular trumpet concerto for Hakan Hardenberger, a piano concerto for Emanuel Ax and a cello one for Yo-Yo Ma demonstrate, the form fits his style, and the interplay between soloist and orchestra works well for his method. Often this is brazenly oppositional: if one side of the equation is melodic and tonal, the other will be brash and angular.

Rough Music is anything but what its title suggests; this is sophisticated stuff and often a very beguiling listen. Much frantic business from the soloist at the start gives way to calm about four minutes into the first movement, when the strings provide a melodious underscore, the brass becomes percussive, and the percussion soloist rather lyrical.

In the central movement the soloist alternates between hi-velocity work on a drum kit and a suite of arias for vibraphone, and the finale quotes liberally from Erik Satie and his disciple Henri Sauguet in a sequence that seems to be a tribute to French chanson and dance music, with a suitably dramatic conclusion.

The BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Juanjo Mena at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall in 2014, has slightly less presence in the mix for that work than is immediately audible in the BBC Proms recording under John Storgards at the Royal Albert Hall a year later. This was the premier of the work Gruber composed for Currie, into the open . . ., a multi-layered half-hour which exploits the soloist’s athleticism on an enormous array of percussion, Japanese gongs prominent alongside tuned orchestral instruments.

While still very much about the musical possibilities of the forces at his disposal, there was another side to the composition of this work for Gruber, in that it remembers his friend, musicologist and great Kurt Weill scholar David Drew. Small fragments of Weill’s Alabama Song pepper the score and there is an aching sense of anguish and loss in the work, and, more challengingly perhaps, of unfinished business.

Keith Bruce