Festival Music
Colin Currie and Friends
Queen’s Hall
Keith Bruce
Five stars
There was a nice illustration of the companionship indicated in the title given to this quartet incarnation of percussionist Colin Currie’s group during the first performance that featured all four on stage, when the leader used a pause change of mallets to turn a page of the intricate music for pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips.
The piece was the Scottish premiere of Steve Reich’s Quartet for Two Vibraphones and Two Pianos, from 2013, and the group was completed by Crawford-Phillips’ regular piano duo partner Philip Moore and the co-leader of the LSO’s percussion section Sam Walton. The piece delights in its own parallelism, as you would expect of Reich, and has a characteristically perfect arc of construction with the vibes assuming the ascendency at its peak. Its dynamic are crucial and it becomes rather quiet, sparse and very slow indeed in places - and very little to do with “minimalism”.
That is also true of astonishing piano duo, Hallelujah Junction by John Adams, which opened the recital, a remarkable virtuoso piece of constantly evolving and interweaving patterns, the pianists seeming to swap “lead” roles in the same bar, phases of syncopation, batting block chords across the stage, and a requirement of both to have a muscular stride left hand.
Rolf Wallin’s wittily-titled Realismos Magicos for solo marimba, is 11 impressionist vignettes derived from the titles of short stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and became lovely little musical narratives of their own.
The concert ended with Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, a performance of remarkable refinement, the slow movement ideally suited to the intimacy of the venue and the finale Bela Bartok at his most playful.
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