Colin Currie Group review – Turnage’s percussion sextet is varied and vivid

Percussionist Colin Currie originally created the group that carries his name specifically to play Steve Reich’s early percussion-based works, but it has steadily extended its repertoire well beyond the music of the great American minimalist. So, while their latest concert did include works by Reich, it also featured pieces by Julia Wolfe and Rolf Wallin, and ended with the UK premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s New England Études, for percussion sextet.

The six short movements of Turnage’s piece were first performed in Boston last year. They call for a wide range of pitched and unpitched instruments, alternating between music in which the focus is on the interplay of rhythmically characterised ideas, and movements in which the interest is predominantly melodic, whether quietly lyrical or stompingly energetic. The fifth is entitled Bells for Ukraine and conjures a consoling, hymn-like melody from marimbas and vibraphones, emerging out of a chiming halo of gongs and bells. Alongside the other works in the programme, the sequence seemed strikingly varied and vividly coloured. Currie conducted the premiere; elsewhere he was very much one of the performers.

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Certainly in the rest of the programme the emphasis was on music in which process matters most. Reich’s two works set the tone: in Music for Pieces of Wood, pairs of claves set up the steadily shifting patterns, while in the first section of his epic Drumming, four pairs of tuned bongos, played with sticks, conjure the intricate textures. It’s music that depends on immaculate precision, and like everything in the programme both pieces were played with almost casual virtuosity by Currie and his colleagues. Wallin’s Twine was a dialogue between xylophone and marimba, the two instruments either alternating swirling ideas, or coming together to create intricate filigree, while Wolfe’s Dark Full Ride knitted four drum kits into a welter of cross-rhythms, sometimes led by cymbals, sometimes by the assortment of drums. Noisy, but curiously compelling.