East Neuk Festival

Colin Currie

The Bowhouse, by St Monans/ St Ayle’s Church, Cellardyke

Keith Bruce

Five stars

THE East Neuk Festival debut of Scotland’s star percussion virtuoso Colin Currie will stand as one of the landmark appearances in the event’s 15 year history. The main event was a concert of music by Reich, Stockhausen and Kevin Volans on Saturday afternoon featuring his new quartet with Owen Gunnell, Adrian Spillett and Sam Walton. As they tuned the instruments for the culminating performance of Reich’s Drumming, Currie explained a little of its astonishing structure in his customary relaxed and informative way, but it would take more than a few introductory remarks to demystify the virtuosity required to dispatch Reich’s masterpiece. The same might be said for the overlapping pulses of Four Marimbas by the South African Volans, audibly indebted to the more compact mbira, or thumb piano, from his native continent and the patterns of traditional music, but married to the conceptual complexity of contemporary composition.

Sitting midway between those, but opening the concert, was Reich’s Mallet Quartet, a work of around a decade ago that moves through tempi but is chiefly concerned with exploring the different timbres of modern tuned percussion. Someway off to the side, characteristically, was Currie’s solo vibraphone excursion into the realm of Karlheinz Stockhausen and a very pretty interlude from the Friday section of the week-long opera project that consumed so much of his later career.

It would have sat as comfortably in Currie’s duo recital with pianist Hue Watkins the previous afternoon, in which the marimba solo, Reminiscence, by Toshio Hosokawa featured rolling resonances at the bottom of the instrument that proved prescient of the rumbling thunder that would arrive in the East Neuk the following day. Beginning with a Joe Duddell piece, Parallel Lines, in which there were surely echoes of Blondie’s Sunday Girl and Heart of Glass, the big work was a commission from Watkins, Seven Inventions, which (perhaps serendipitously) mirrored the structure of the whole concert in the way his material was shared between the melodious percussion, whether played with fingers or sticks. The discovery of that programme, however, was a short work by American harpist Hannah Lash, perhaps nodding to Terry Riley in its title, “C”, and a terrific piece of motorik modern minimalism.