And Evelyn warned me about the volume: not `I’ll be drowned out’ but `You’ll have to watch the strings because I can drown them, and sometimes I can drown the woodwind too’. I prefer to exploit Evelyn’s virtuosity with the mallets, rather than having her worrying, `Can I get to the woodblocks in time?’ I thought of pieces like James Wood’s Marimba Concerto, and began to think something marimba-centric would be rather beautiful.”The next stage was to visit Glennie at home to work out what something “marimba-centric” might be: “I experimented, with Evelyn, quite a bit, listening to the different spectra a marimba produces, the brilliant and the soft, noting the instrument’s peculiarities. A violinist has one instrument to cope with: a percussionist may have dozens.That poses problems for a composer commissioned to write for percussion: which percussion? It’s a problem that Jonathan Harvey initially found daunting: “This is the first time I’ve written for solo percussion, and my first response was that it was very difficult. I don’t like the idea of building an enormous percussion edifice for each performance.
That’s why the percussion kit is so large, and why a performance by Glennie so often resembles a gymnastic display as much as a conventional performance. And tomorrow, Evelyn Glennie is the soloist in the world premiere of Jonathan Harvey’s Percussion Concerto.
It’s no exaggeration to suggest that percussion is the beating heart of 20th-century music, and not just as a pulse, but also offering an unprecedented wealth of timbral possibilities, from the most subtly evanescent to the most brutally violent. This week’s BBC Proms concerts give a good sense of percussion’s new prominence. On Sunday, Ensemble Modern performed Steve Reich’s Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, as well as Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ and Percussion; on Wednesday Ensemble Bash offered more Reich alongside John Cage’s music for prepared piano, music to remind us that the piano is, in essence, a percussion instrument. The modern symphony orchestra might include half a dozen percussionists, a mighty battery of sound behind the main body of the orchestra, while percussion ensembles are an integral part of the fabric of music-making in a way quite inconceivable even half a century ago. No doubt that’s why, for centuries, Western classical music placed percussion at the margins: too elemental, too fundamental, simply too exciting to be art That has changed in the 20th century.
Banging things is the most elemental musical impulse, and anything you can hit can be a percussion instrument. Steven Maughan accompanied with panache on a 1950s-sounding Yamaha.. The intimate, regal final tableau epitomised this common-sense production. Her mellow tone and positive pitching paid countless dividends – never more so than in her magnificent coloratura over the closing quintet. How rarely a young singer emerges with the verve and range to manage Rossini’s contralto Cenenterola But here is one. His Guildhall colleague, Malaysian-born David Quah, shared his initial insecurity. By the second half, though, both had ironed out the problems, and their whispering duet was a delight.The production’s plum was mezzo-soprano Harriet Williams.
