In my interview for Bachtrack, Colin Currie discusses the large-scale Steve Reich Festival he has organized with The Hallé (running 1-3 February 2024):
Colin Currie vividly recalls the moment he first met Steve Reich in person. The occasion was a concert at London’s Southbank Centre in 2011 featuring Reich’s landmark early work Drumming (1970–71), in a performance by Currie’s own ensemble. Though he had previously received encouragement from Reich, this was the first time that the eminent American composer’s gruelling schedule made it possible for him to hear the Colin Currie Group live….
Sandbox Percussion is scheduled to perform Andy Akiho’s “Seven Pillars” in Seattle on Dec. 3 and in Olympia on Dec. 4. (Daniel Ashworth)
Seven Pillars, an epic for percussion quartet by the marvelous composer Andy Akiho, receives its live performance world premiere this weekend in Seattle by the Sandbox Percussion ensemble. My story for The Seattle Times:
“The spirit of percussion opens everything,” musician John Cage once declared. He had in mind the way percussion music can open the door to unaccustomed ways of listening — and even of perceiving the environment around us…..
And this weekend brings another not-to-be-missed percussion classic: Michael Gordon’s hour-long Timber, for six players, which is being presented by Base: Experimental Arts + Space: 6520 5th Avenue South, #122nd, Seattle, WA 98108 on Dec 4 and 5 at 3 and 8pm. Features a six-player instrument built by local master carpenter Isaac Anderson & light design by Kevin Blanquies.
Have you heard the wonderful music of Luís Tinoco? I invite you to try out the latest album of his work, Archipelago, recently released on the Odradek label.
I first encountered this excellent Portuguese composer and acclaimed radio host — who grew up in the post-revolution generation — in the early Morlot days with Seattle Symphony, when they played FrisLand, a kind of orchestral ode to Bill Frisell. (FrisLand is available, along with such works as Tinoco’s Cello Concerto, on his previous Odradek album, The Blue Voice of the Water).
Tinoco, 50, has written some pieces for the stage as well as vocal and orchestral works. Archipelago focuses on chamber pieces featuring percussion and surveys Tinoco’s musical language over the past two decades.
The composer’s father was a professional painter and an amateur jazz musician, and the obvious camaraderie Tinoco enjoys with the Porto-based Drumming Grupo de Percussão (Drumming GP) — though he himself is not a performer — suggests an intriguing blend of working with a classical chamber ensemble and a tight-knit jazz band.
Drumming GP, led by Miquel Barnat and celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, has earned a strong reputation for its boundary-crossing projects. Tinoco first collaborated with the group when they commissioned him in 2003, and he dedicates to them the album’s culminating work, Steel Factory (another of the several pieces they have commissioned from him over the years).
Archipelago was recorded in the monastery of São Bento da Vitória in Porto. The album is also available in 5.1 surround, so you can immerse yourself entirely in the expert production by sound engineers Hugo Romano Guimarães and Santi Barguñó.
Tinoco has included several pieces from the early 2000s. The opening track, Short Cuts, revisits his 2004 saxophone quartet, refashioned here for percussion. Already in this early stage of his career, Tinoco was developing a language centered on deftly channeled currents of energy, here intensified through the alluring timbral combinations he has devised anew for the percussion ensemble.
Another early piece, the circular Ends Meet, is for marimba and string quartet and was originally written for the percussionist Pedro Carneiro. Tinoco derives fascinating dramatic impulses from the combination of these sound worlds over the course of this four-movement piece as it continually revisits material from different perspectives.
Mind the Gap from 2000, is the earliest piece here, a product of Tinoco’s years as a postgraduate student in London, and charts a variety of journeys with solo marimba.
If Tinoco’s neatly chiseled rhythmic patterns evoke a sense of distances traveled, the recent Genetically Modified Fados (2018, a commission from Drumming GP) oscillates back and forth in time. Tinoco juxtaposes music for percussion quartet with archival recordings of Portuguese Fado featuring male and female singers. These faded, embedded artefacts strip away any sentimentality from the nostalgia. The radiant ghostliness of the triptych’s third panel, Camellias, is especially spellbinding.
In Zoom in – Zoom out, another Drumming GP commission (2010, dedicated to Bernat), Tinoco turns to the popular music of Brazil subliminally by alluding to its rhythmic patterns and melodic structures. It is scored for a trio playing vibraphone, two marimbas, and two bass drums.
The most recently composed music is the title track (2019, also dedicated to Bernat), which is for solo vibraphone and eight wah-wah tubes. Archipelago is a stunningly beautiful poem made of subtly timed resonances, exquisitely micro-tonal differentiations in the tuning of the tubes, and a carefully calibrated dramaturgy of varying mallets and bowings (and even hands). Archipelago submerges the listener in a hauntingly liquescent environment. Add it to your list of evocative water musics.
Archipelago also makes for a fascinating contrast with the grand finale and longest track, Steel Factory (2006). In this piece for an ensemble of steel drums, Tinoco again foregrounds his music of energy, starting with deep, ominous pulsations that set the stage for its highly theatrical gestures. The sound world here also incorporates bongos and steel bars (sixens) and elicits an astonishing variety, later building to a thrillingly clangorous climax.
The National Symphony Orchestra’s program this weekend, conducted by Manuel López-Gómez, is titled Rhythms of the Americas. It will include the world premiere of a new Concerto for Steelpan by the composer and percussionist Andy Akiho, who was recently named winner of the The Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund.
Here’s a taste of what to expect from Andy’s new concerto. Inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, he has given the piece an evocative title: Beneath Lighted Coffers:
When the National Symphony undertook its first international concert tour under Music Director Christoph Eschenbach’s leadership in June 2012-playing at venues across the Americas-the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago was among its destinations. The NSO performed a concert in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Republic’s independence from the United Kingdom, and the following day Music Director Christoph Eschenbach was presented with a steelpan by the Prime Minister in gratitude. A tuned percussion instrument made of sheet metal that was invented in Trinidad and Tobago in the 20th century, the steelpan is a fitting symbol for the Republic’s independence from colonial domination. At that occasion Maestro Eschenbach announced that the NSO would commission a concerto for this marvelously versatile instrument.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 