Explore the new works recently premiered by Colin Currie

• Simon Holt a table of noises
• Alexander Goehr Since brass, nor Stone...
• Jennifer Higdon Percussion Concerto

Colin Currie performs the world premiere of Simon Holt 's percussion concerto a table of noises

Colin Currie percussion

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins conductor

Birmingham Town Hall
14 May 2008

Simon Holt a table of noises
(world premiere)

Movements:
jute / ghost one / fly / ghost two /
a drawer full of eyes / ghost three / skennin’ Mary / ghost four / table top (with ghost five) / under glass

Introduction

Simon Holt's new percussion concerto, a table of noises , was completed at the end of 2007. The work was written for Colin Currie, who had been given funding by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust for the specific purpose of expanding the percussion repertoire; It was commissioned jointly by the Trust and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Wanting to avoid the lavish, wide-spread layout of most percussion concertos, Holt decided to use only instruments that could be placed on a table-top at which the performer sits, together with a xylophone placed alongside. (The title is a translation of mesa de ruidas, one of several names for the box-shaped cajón which is a staple of Peruvian folk music and has also been imported into Spanish flamenco.) The soloist is accompanied by an orchestra of nine woodwind, mostly concentrating on extremes of pitch-range and without standard-sized flutes, clarinets or bassoons, ten brass, two orchestral percussionists, celeste, harp, and strings without violins.

The idea of gathering the solo instruments on a table-top in turn reminded Holt of a figure of his Lancashire childhood, his Great-Uncle Ash. Ashworth Hutton, to give him his full name, was a taxidermist (among other things) who was severely disabled and so kept everything essential to him close at hand on the parlour table. Holt's memories of his great-uncle provide the titles of the main movements.

Press reaction

“A Table of Noises, given its outstanding premiere by Colin Currie with Martyn Brabbins conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony…
There are six movements, all vividly characterised… It is a concerto full of vivid, prickly textures.
…What one takes away from the work is a delicacy, in the sense of the sounds all being drawn from that fund of memories; it ends quietly, nostalgically, the final tempo marked ‘as slow as trees’.”
The Guardian

“… brittle, unsettling and full of bite… Currie’s virtuosic performance confirmed that the percussion repertory has been enriched.“
The Sunday Telegraph

“Holt wanted to avoid the reckless flamboyance of many a percussion concerto… The restraint pays off. One can follow the solo line, unpitched though it mostly is, more clearly than often in such pieces.
In other ways, the music is unbridled, favouring the sonic extremes of piccolo and contrabassoon, and dispensing with the normative presence of violins and violas.
Holt has produced one of his most likeable and subtly coloured scores.”
The Sunday Times

"I loved the work's surprises and originality, the playful use of Holt's gifts for colour and concise gestures. Throughout, the CBSO matched Currie's dexterity."
The Times

“The solo part is virtuosic, but never flashily so… and eventually moving to a cadenza where, though the rhythms are notated, the choice of instruments is left to the soloist.
Its premiere from Currie was fluent and assured, the complexities memorised and encompassed with impressive confidence.”
Birmingham Post

Colin Currie's blog

'Dear All,
This note is to introduce, as best I can, an extremely important departure for the percussion repertoire. Quite unlike any piece of music I know, the new Simon Holt percussion concerto a table of noises exuberantly tears up the manual on how to approach the medium and I am thrilled with the idiosyncratic, adventurous results. The title draws on some initial research Simon made into percussion instruments, and the discovery of a Peruvian instrument named Una Mesa de Ruidos (A Table of Noises)...'

Click here to read more on Colin's website.

Further Links

» Colin's website

» Chester Novello

» Borletti-Buitoni Trust

» City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

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The Pavel Haas Quartet and Colin Currie perform a world première, Alexander Goehr's Since Brass nor Stone... Fantasia for string quartet and percussion Op.80

Thursday 10 July 2008
St Andrew's Church, Holborn

Pavel Haas Quartet
Colin Currie percussion

Programme:

Notes from the programme

Peter Maxwell Davies ' Sad Paven is based on Thomas Tomkin's keyboard work of the same name. In 1646 Oliver Cromwell's parlimentary army entered the city of Worcester, where Tomkin's was cathedral choirmaster and organist: the choir was disbanded, the organ dismantled and Tomkins out of a job. Three centuries later, war was to have more tragic consequences for for Pavel Haas . A Moravian-Czech Jew, Haas was sent by the occupying Nazis to Theresienstadt concentration camp, and later died in Auschwitz. Theresienstadt was set up as a propagandist showcase for the creative arts: a film survives of Haas, who had been Janácek's outstanding pupil, taking a bow after a performance there of his Study for String Orchestra . His second quartet, composed in happier times in 1925, was inspired by the mountains near his native city of Brno, and features a percussionist in its dance-like finale.

Alexander Goehr 's new work has been specially commissioned for this unusual combination, as the composer explains: "Since Brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea... The opening line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 65 not only offers a title... but each of the four elements - brass, stone, earth and the boundless sea - are also points of reference for the sound-world present in a percussion refrain. In essence, the music is a succession of fugal inventions in a number of sections which run continuously together with a solo percussion part of considerable virtuosity." The composer has dedicated this work to the memory of Pavel Haas and his colleagues.

Click on the link below to hear Colin Currie and Peter Jarusek , cellist with the Pavel Haas Quartet, discussing the evening's performance:

Reviews

"Apropos a debate raging in this newspaper, new classical music seems to be alive, well and, in many cases, none too hard to love. On the final evening of the City of London festival, St Andrew church in Holborn hosted a rewarding early programme by the rising Pavel Haas Quartet and percussionist Colin Currie. At its centre was the premiere of Since Brass, Nor Stone ... by Alexander Goehr, a 12-minute movement evoking the metallic, earthy and fluid imagery in Shakespeare's Sonnet No 65. In the most lyrical of his dance-like episodes, Goehr writes a melody that almost fits the text - but rather than being sung, it is played on a glockenspiel, ear-splittingly high yet buoyed by the strings. The sound-world is glossy, glinting and individual.

The Quartet No 2, by Pavel Haas, which brings drums into its rumbustious finale, made an apt counterpart. Haas, who died in Auschwitz, was Janacek's star pupil, and his music has the buzzing textures and joyful melodic invention of his teacher."
The Guardian, 5 stars

"The Pavel Haas Quartet, one of the world's best young string quartets... In their final programme at St Andrew's Church, Holborn, not a hair of a note was out of place; nor was the playing limply beautiful. When Maxwell Davies needed sorrow and anger for A Sad Paven for These Distracted Times, out they poured. And in their namesake's second quartet, From the Monkey Mountain, its folk rhythms shone incandescent.

Still, it was the new piece by Alexander Goehr that really made this concert. Goehr's music can be overstudious, but there was nothing bookish about Since Brass, nor Stone for quartet and percussion (the excellent Colin Currie), composed in memory of Haas and fellow musicians in the Nazi camps. For some 15 minutes strings surged ahead in deliciously hiccupping fugal patterns overlaid with intricate, delicate percussion. The Haas includes percussion, but only to highlight the string textures; Goehr's achievement is to fuse his sound sources into a magical garden of dappled textures. This is music that delights the ear, stimulates the brain and moves the heart: what more can a listener want?"
The Times

"Schoenberg and co begat Boulez and co, but where were the successors to Bartok and Janacek? Incinerated in Auschwitz in 1944: Hans Krasa, Viktor Ullmann and Pavel Haas were the pre-eminent voices of Czech music in the Twenties and Thirties, and their disappearance left a gaping void in musical history.

Haas's String Quartet No 2, composed 10 years before he was swept up into the Nazi nightmare, has the dreaminess of Janacek and the pared-down, angular beauty of Bartok, and it stands as an ineffably sad monument to the greater music he might have gone on to write. To hear it played in St Andrew Holborn Church by the Pavel Haas Quartet, with its recently rediscovered percussion part added by percussionist Colin Currie, was a rare privilege; Haas's evocation of country sounds and the rhythms of village life was beautifully rendered.

But the audience that packed this concert had primarily come to hear Peter Maxwell Davies' reworking of a Thomas Tomkins piece, A Sad Paven for these Distracted Tymes, and to celebrate the premiere of a work by Alexander Goehr. The Sad Paven was a powerful and densely worked miniature, which began with bleached viol textures and then did a Bartok on them.

Goehr's piece was gnomically entitled Since Brass, nor Stone... Fantasia for string quartet and percussion Op 80, and seemed at first an odd melding, with the percussion going one way, while the strings went their own darker way. Yet this apparent dislocation actually cohered: ending interrogatively mid-phrase, it had an introverted, gritty beauty."
The Independent, 5 stars

"..[This] concert was given by the young Pavel Haas Quartet in the church of St Andrew, Holborn, and brought the premiere of Alexander Goehr’s Since Brass, nor Stone . . . , a one-movement “fantasia” for another irregular combination: string quartet and percussion. This one was a triumph of the unlikely. Goehr’s imagination, sparked off by a Shakespeare sonnet, fuses the disparate sound-worlds with a rigorous, toccata-like brilliance. The score reveals that some of the words are “set” for glockenspiel. The performance with Colin Currie was enthralling."
Sunday Times

• City of London Festival

• BBC New Generation Artists

• Royal Philharmonic Society

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Jennifer Higdon's Percussion Concerto Commissioned for Colin Currie by three U.S. orchestras

Introduction

Jennifer Higdon's Percussion Concerto was commissioned for Colin Currie by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. It was premiered in the 2005/6 season by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Christoph Eschenbach in Philadelphia, Washington and at Carnegie Hall. Currie gave the European premiere with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop in December 2007, which was recorded for LPO Live and released in October 2008.

Reviews

Minnesota Orchestra & Osmo Vänskä
"A percussion concerto by Jennifer Higdon that has been bringing down houses since Currie premiered it three years ago in Philadelphia. He did the same Thursday - a whip-dance showpiece requiring Currie to march back and forth across the stage to handle a bewildering assortment of instruments in ways that range from trap-set hammering to marimba-warbling serenity. Higdon's 25-minute concerto is also a fairly constant interaction between Currie, the irrepressible soloist, and the orchestra's hard-working, five-member percussion battery. The performance solicits a roar."
Pioneer Press , May 2008

London Philharmonic Orchestra & Marin Alsop / European premiere
"Stomping and thrilling sounds also shot out from the American composer Jennifer Higdon... During Colin Currie's cadenza, nearby violinists daintily covered an ear. Yet nowhere in this 24-minuite piece did rhythmic exuberance ever become sheer noise. Progressing from throbbing marimba through clattering woodblocks to a drum kit from hell, Currie always found beauty in precision. Elegance, too.
And for all its high decibel effusions Higdon layered her piece very delicately, with due regard for exploiting orchestral space."
Daily Telegraph , December 2007

“...Colin Currie, the solo percussionist, ably demonstrated the concerto's worth, rushing from instrument to instrument... He played with great virtuosity and great colour, opening the concerto with hushed, humming marimba drones and relishing the contrast between the work's virtuosic outer sections and dappled, elusive centre. His antiphonies with the orchestral percussion were arresting in their violence... Throughout, Currie made not one wrong move, even in the fiendishly difficult cadenza, and Alsop provided characterful, ebullient orchestral accompaniment.”
Musicomh.com , December 2007

Philadelphia Orchestra & Christoph Eschenbach / world premiere performances
“The performance elicited a cheering ovation for the extraordinary percussion soloist, Colin Currie, and for the composer…”
New York Times , December 2005

“Colin Currie ran lithely about the stage, summoning whispered arpeggiations from the marimba, icy chimes from the xylophone and a wild "battle-of-the-bands" drum solo toward the finale.”
Washington Post , November 2005

“The slow movement had wave after wave of ecstatic, intense color, with sound shapes created by bowing cymbals. Broad Coplandesque melodies commanded the ear, though everything around them went in unexpected directions.”
Philadelphia Inquirer , November 2005

“Higdon is now said to be the second-most-performed of living American orchestral composers, trailing only John Adams -- and the standing ovation her concerto received was both full-hearted and seemingly all but unanimous.”
Washington Post , November 2005

Further links

» London Philharmonic Orchestra (interview with Colin Currie)

» Minnesota Public Radio (audio interview with Colin Currie)

» Jennifer Higdon

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