Star rating: ****
COLIN Currie's name has long been synonymous with subtlety in percussion playing, at least among those who know the style of Scotland's international percussion star. Sure, he can do the flash bit in concertos, but his style, rather like the man himself, is anti-rhetorical: he eschews flamboyance. Currie has a quiet intensity that is his trademark.
And that intensity permeated his Perth recital on Monday when he was joined by members of the Hebrides Ensemble in a programme that was characterised by one of his ambitions: to establish an intimate chamber music format for percussion that avoids the crash-bang-wallop school of programming and performance.
He achieved comprehensively that objective in his programme, even in Joe Duddell's funky classic, Parallel Lines, now nearly a decade old and as fresh as ever with Simon Smith's pristine pianism the perfect complement to Currie's marimba wizardry.
Intimacy, in fact, was the hallmark of the concert, from Yann Ghiro's cool, murmured phrases in Hakkola's Five Clips, to the luminous Romanticism of Sarah Kirkland-Snyder's Shiner, in which Currie's delectable marimba playing was garlanded by the soft colours of harp, viola and bass clarinet, with John Kenny's tenor trombone playing showing the instrument at its most tender, lyrical and avuncular.
Ultimately, it was Steve Reich's Music for Pieces of Wood, where five featured musicians downed tools, picked up claves and woodblocks, and wove a gentle, hypnotic spell of rhythm clouded by no orchestral colours, that mesmerised. On Saturday, the Currie big band takes the stage for Reich's masterpiece, Drumming.
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