DENMARK'S Safri Duo could not match Evelyn Glennie's drawing power at this venue, but those who did attend were highly responsive to both the music and the personable style of presentation of these virtuoso percussionists.
Despite their formal white tie and tailcoats, Uffe Savery and Morten Friis liked to introduce each piece with an informal chat, in which they explained aspects of the music or the instruments involved, cracked jokes, and even taught the audience to clap the basic rhythm pattern of Steve Reich's Clapping Music, first in unison (not bad), then in canon (not good). Mercifully, they performed the piece, one of his complex phase works, by themselves.
Their programme included three arrangements of familiar keyboard works by Bach, Mendelssohn (his Fugue in F minor) and Ravel (the Spanish-influenced Alborado del Gracioso). All of them transferred well enough from the piano's tuned percussion to that of marimba and xylophone, without adding anything of great note in the process.
Per Norgard echoed Bach in his Well-Tempered Percussion, a fascinating piece which took three well-known preludes (in C, F sharp and D minor) from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and, without changing a single note, re-phrased the melodies and rhythmic accents to produce quite different, distanced refractions of the music.
The two contemporary works in the second half were substantial pieces. Rolf Wallin's energised Twine drew immensely empathic interplay from them on marimba and xylophone, as did Minoru Miki's Marimba Spiritual II, which built from a gentle, muted opening into a stream of complex rhythmic energy on marimba and percussion. A virtuso dance around the marimba on Flight of the Bumblebee provided a vibrant encore.
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