“Incantations” holds a special place in my repertoire, and is best described perhaps as the truly great “romantic concerto” for the solo percussionist. I approached this composer with the following in mind, that the end result would be a work of great drama, mystery and power, such was my experience hearing previous works of his. Also, I was thinking that the piece would most likely trace the structure of the familiar romantic concerto; employ bold sweeping themes, recapitulation of material at key moments, a haunting and beautiful slow movement perhaps, a cadenza…and indeed it proved to be so, and how! What excited me immediately about this was that as a percussionist, I had never had a chance to partake in this kind of musical structure in the pieces I play, as they are often housed in more abstract architecture. So – finally, a “classic” for my repertoire.
One of the things that so thrilled and moved me about getting this concerto off the ground was the initial trip to Helsinki to meet the great man at his apartment. Rather frail due to a very difficult health condition, he greeted me warmly at the front door, and I shook the hand that in turn shook that of Jean Sibelius. No sooner had I crossed the threshold however, than Mr Rautavaara proceeded to seat himself at the grand piano in the lounge area and launch into the searing opening theme from his latest work – a concerto for me! And this meeting was scheduled as a “meet-and-greet”! I was humbled down to my shoes.
Following this, we corresponded often, tweaking notes and percussion instrumentation, and I worked hard for about three weeks myself in the summer of 2009 to compose the cadenza, a task that I both relished and enjoyed. The premiers in London, Rotterdam, Tampere and Baltimore saw the work grow considerably under my hands, as I learned to dare to produce the often rather strong yet maximally lyrical tone needed for much of the music. The recording, made in January 2011 in a very wintery Helsinki sounds glorious I think – bold and richly dramatic, expansive yet mysterious.

I hope you will enjoy this recording, a strong and adventurous addition to the percussion discography.

Warmly, Colin

More than twenty years later I receive in the mail the full score for the now 102-year-old Elliott Carter’s latest work, the “Conversations” for Solo Piano, Solo Percussion and Chamber Orchestra. The first light-headed chill and personal resonance comes in the very first measures; “Variations for Orchestra” starts with three discrete chords for the wind, strings and brass…and I see that, eerily, my new work begins with precisely the same aural-palette-cleansing device. I read on. And appear to have a modern masterpiece in my hands, a gem of scherzando wit and ebullience. I am humbled, but not enough to delay my race to the marimba to check out the licks and chords I will be playing shortly. They crackle and scream, they laugh and shock. This is going to be a lot of fun.

I had decided in the first place to inquire about this double concerto idea a couple of years ago. Carter seemed to be ignoring his advanced age, so I thought I’d do the same and ask Boosey and Hawkes about the idea of having him write a work for percussion and piano soloists with ensemble. I thought it might catch his imagination, especially in the light of recent works for percussion (the marimba Figment and Tintinnabulation), and the sensational ensemble pieces “ASKO Concerto”, “Dialogues” and the “Boston Concerto”.

Extremely happily, the premiere was with dear friend and close colleague Pierre-Laruent Aimard, plus new friends the BCMG and old friend Oliver Knussen. I have many great experiences from about ten years ago playing with Olly as a part of the London Sinfonietta (Andriessen and Henze at the Proms, Xenakis works), including the UK premiere of Carter’s opera “What Next?” where I even donned a builder’s hard hat as part of the concert performance. So it was with great zest and inquisitive spirit that we worked together again on this new work. The rehearsals were fascinating and I recall thinking at one precise moment (as a clarinet group of five suddenly transported us into a faster tempo where the same speed of notes were divided into groups of three) “Wow – a REAL Carter piece!”

At the premiere in Aldeburgh the work received hungry applause and we immediately played the piece from the beginning once again. Each performance is going to uncover something new with this work, and second time round I felt even more free to explore the latent mischief and expressivity within the work. In “Conversations”, the final gesture of cackling winds and strings followed by soft extremities of register from the soloists leaves much ambiguity in the air…but one certainty also – Elliott Carter has much more to write.

JR Thanks! I have always been very fond of using a lot of percussion in my orchestral and ensemble writing and during my student days I had already written various pieces for percussion soloist and ensemble for a percussion student’s final exam (in fact, the fiendishly difficult cadenza in your concerto originated in one of those early pieces, but for you I made the music much more difficult, with many more notes…). So at least I knew I had a certain affinity for the medium of the percussion concerto and I didn’t hesitate a moment when I was asked to write a percussion concerto. The biggest surprise, however, came when I heard that the soloist in question would be Colin Currie… I was really thrilled about that!

CC This is the first in a series of ‘Rotterdam Concertos’ commissioned by the De Doelen Hall. Having learnt the solo part and studied the score I would also say it acknowledges certain compositional traits recognisible in The Netherlands. Is this an especially ‘dutch’ work of art would you say?

JR It is, by definition, a “Dutch” work, because I am a Dutch composer, I have lived in the Netherlands all my life and a composer’s music will naturally reflect the place and time in which he or she lives. If you ask me, “is it a typically Dutch work?”, I would say: no, not particularly. True, the piece shows various characteristics that may be regarded as typically Dutch – clarity of expression, clear lines, propulsive rhythms, Andriessen-like unisonos, minimalist elements, a Stravinskian bite – but the piece also shows many “un-Dutch” elements: one might hear undertones of French music in the first movement (which I wrote in a period when I listened a lot to French composers) and of course very un-Dutch are the expressive, pathos-laden romantic moments in the second and fourth movements which I feel are clearly indebted to Mahler and Sibelius. Unlike most Dutch composers, I am not averse to big emotional gestures and my great love for late-romanticism shines through in my music quite overtly, to an extent that many colleagues would regard as sentimental or cheap. What is also very un-Dutch about the piece is its eclecticism and heterogeneity: the piece is saturated with the most diverse influences (a natural consequence of living in a time in which all those diverse influences are part of the musical air we breathe) and I tend to pack a lot of different ideas into one piece. Dutch composers generally prefer more homogeneity, more stylistic purity, more economy of material (e.g., one idea stretched out over a whole piece) – maybe that all harkens back to our Calvinist tradition or maybe it’s a remnant of modernist thinking.

CC Two of the movements suggest the style of ‘pop ballad’ perhaps, with the titles ‘I remember this place’ and ‘It’s over, my friend’ pointing us further in that direction. Do you have anything more to say about these movements? Are they personal in some way?

JR Indeed, these two momevements have strong ties to certain types of pop music that I like (for instance, the ambient works of Brian Eno and Aphex Twin or the atmospheric ballads of Radiohead). That’s also why I chose titles sounding like pop song titles. I think for composers of my generation, it should be a more natural thing to use pop elements, since pop music is an inescapable part of our musical DNA and the ever-widening disconuity between so-called serious music and popular music is a worrisome and unhealthy situation, threatening the future of contemporary classical music or even classical music in general.

In the second movement ‘I remember this place’ I wanted to suggest the feeling of experiencing something familiar, but at the same time there’s something darkly strange and misty about it. For instance, the vibraphone plays these continuous streams of repeated minor triads, making the music almost sound like some sort of loungey ambient kind of pop music (I’m sure old-fashioned modernists will find these harmonies too kitschy or even new-agey, but these are harmonies I like and felt I needed to write), but at the same time lots of things happen harmonically and texturally, which all add a certain strangeness to those “familiar” harmonies of minor triads. So, although the music may refer to ambient pop, at the same time it’s clearly something different, something more complex. And that’s something you’ll find a lot in my music: you’ll hear many references to all kinds of music, but whenever I refer to a specific kind or style of music, it never comes out exactly like that kind of music, but always in a transformed way, like a distorted memory – my distorted memory – of that music. In the fourth movement ‘It’s over, my friend’ one will hear the same triad-based harmonies and pop overtones as in the second movement; here moments of sadness and melancholy (because something good is over?) are alternated with moments of hope and optimism (because something bad is over?). Whether the titles refer to something personal is not important: the titles just tell something about the music’s emotional tone, but I don’t want listeners to be too much guided by them.

CC You have written extensively for the un-pitched percussion in addition to excellent usage of the marimba, vibes and xylophone. Many composers shy away from these instruments of indefinite pitch – how did you embark on writing for them?

JR For me, there’s not that much difference between composing for unpitched percussion and composing for pitched instruments, except that in the case of the latter the composer is mainly concerned about the “right” pitches (making up the melodic and harmonic content) and in the case of the former he is mainly concerned about the “right” rhythms and colors. It’s just a matter of switching to a slightly different mode of compositional thinking but the aim is the same: you just want to write notes that sound good. Many composers are probably more “pitch-focused” than “rhythm-focused” which may be the reason why they might shy away from writing for unpitched percussion. The third movement features almost exclusively unpitched percussion and is therefore perhaps the most rhythmically-oriented movement of the concerto. In this movement I chose to keep the melodic and thematic material (of the ensemble) almost primitively simple so that the focus is really on the constantly changing rhythmic grooves, in which one might at times hear undertones of minimalist or even African music. By using a very large set-up of unpitched percussion instruments I tried to exploit many different combinations of color and texture within your solo part, in order to keep the unpitched percussion writing interesting and varied.

CC For me this concerto balances well between playful virtuosity and expressive intensity. What do you hope the audience take away from this premiere?

JR Well, you just gave an excellent description of what I am trying to achieve with this piece. When I started working on the piece, I knew I did not want to write another percussion concerto that would only showcase the wild and virtuosic side of the percussionist. Many percussion concertos I’ve heard tend to be like that – they’re fantastic virtuoso showpieces,

great fun to play and hear, but emotionally they often strike me as a bit bland and shallow. So I hope I have written a piece that will show listeners that percussion, especially in the capable hands of a musician of your caliber, can do more than just the usual virtuoso firework, that it can express a very broad spectrum of moods and emotions, ranging from the wildly virtuosic to the intimately lyrical to the intensely expressive.

The Beamish and Pereira concentrate on a more intimate sonority, each a concertante work with chamber orchestra. The Beamish promises a set of “dance variations” and we have spoken at length about the charm of this idea and how we can have me integrate within the ensemble to greatest effect. As always, it will be a great honour to perform with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra while the US Premire at Stanford Arts represents a debut for me including educational and recital events alongside. The Pereira will be a fantastic new piece for me with a long future ahead of it – Joseph is a greatly imaginative writer and I’m certain the work will be ambitious, fastidious, fun and full-on. And I get to collaborate with Gustavo Dudamel!!

Otherwise, I look forward to various debuts – Zurich, Aspen, Houston, Madrid and my Balkan debut in Estonia with HK Gruber. The tweets and facebook fanpage posts will be thick and fast, so clock on there for a more complete stream of how the season unfolds!

Many thanks for reading,

Colin

My debut with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra was absolutely the “complete” touring experience. Intense musical adventures, coupled with a fabulously rich social side(including just the right amount of tomfoolery!), in overwhelmingly beautiful surroundings. At the helm of these four weeks was my father Iain who joined me on the tour, and we made our way merrily around a country that neither of us would ever have supposed to visit together, least of all in this set of circumstances. There we are below, on the Doubtful Sound!! Of equal importance though was my dear new friend Alexander Shelley, a true gentleman and scholar, and a brilliant new collaborator. His mock-pique at being greeted by a giant poster OF ME as we descended the escalator to collect our bags following our long-haul flights set the tone for truly awesome times, awash with banter and conviviality. Melissa, Leah, Gary and the whole team in the office knew no limit in their kindness and the percussion boys Lenny,  Larry and the whole gang were just a perfect 10. This tour was just SO much fun – and I may just about have played the best MacMillan of my career in the (superb) Auckland Town Hall, as well as one of the most important when we performed a free-event to the packed hall in Christchurch to honour the citizens of the newly earth-shaken city.

This autumn also saw the welcome reprise of a recent premiere in Kurt Schwertsik’s mercurial “Now you hear me, now you don’t” which was toured by Sinfonia Viva and given its co-commissioning premiere by the classy Norrlands Opera. I’m delighted by how this work has taken hold and always enjoy its challenges and charms. I also had the chance to tour Harrison Birtwistle’s “The Axe Manual” in Scotland. This was delicious – what a buzz to perform this work. Twenty-two minutes with not a weak moment; coruscating rhythmic devices, lucid poetry, and a very very violent ending! May I also offer  a big old “chapeau” to Simon Smith who tore up the fiendish piano part with abandon and accuracy both.

The Higdon rolls on and on and it was a blast to work with JoAnn Falletta once again and especially with her really rather splendid Virginia Symphony. I look forward to more of that soon with the Oregon Symphony and we even have tickets for Celtics/Blazers! Shaq – I paid good money to go see you in Phoenix and you bailed so you bettah show up this time – or you will no longer be my one “Favourite” on Twitter!!

For all this, what truly sticks in my mind are thirty young percussionists from across the world who all traveled to Eindhoven for the TROMP Percussion Festival and competition. There I sat on the jury(with splendid new friends Nancy, Momoko, Terry, Arnold, Andrei and Emmanuel!) utterly AGOG as candidate after candidate would roll on and literally shock us with their artistry, emotion and aplomb. Each player had something to offer, and it was a humbling thing to give the world premiere of the test-piece, Michael Torke’s gorgeous “Mojave” to such an assembly. What a superb result, that the art of percussion is being upheld by these bright young players!! I was very moved and highly encouraged. Let me pay tribute briefly to the three finalists; Vassilena, you are fearless and brilliant and utterly embrace performing…Mike, you are a poet and the thinking musician’s percussionist – a maverick with grace and subtlety…Alexej, your musicianship fills a room no matter its size and your results have only come through your astonishing commitment and hard work. Congratulations to you all – this was an astounding collective victory for percussion!!

Happy December times and best wishes for the new year,

Colin.

Styriarte Festival Graz, Austria

This trip was to meet up once again with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich to perform Bartok’s “Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion”. As ever, I brought my partner in crime Sam Walton with me and we relished this concert in particular as PLA had programmed the Bartok alongside ( in some cases re-workings and new versions of) pieces by Ligeti, Steve Reich, Eotvos,  Nancarrow and Kurtag. It is such a great pleasure to be part of this quartet; Pierre-Laurent seems to know not of limits in music – and every moment of both rehearsal and concert show such care and consideration to sound and balance, clarity and projection. To be on-stage next to him as he embarks on a piece like Ligeti’s Etude “Fem” is to hear instrumental achievement at its highest; it is astounding to hear such graceful and precise sense of timing, and such absolute control so excited by the spontaneity of the moment.

Sam and I also loved the city; the world cup was on and the place was very lively at night. We ran by the river, hired bikes and ate extremely well at the Santa Clara restaurant. As ever, the lottery attendant on hiring timpani abroad was not absent; my second drum only achieved a top ‘e’ by having its flimsy front leg generously gaffa-taped to the stage and by my applying an eccentric amount of pedal pressure, causing me to levitate momentarily above my timp-stool!

BBC Proms – Simon Holt concerto

After some careful deliberation as whether the Holt concerto would sink or swim in the vast space of the Albert Hall, all parties agreed that it would fare well and so it was that I got to play this masterpiece at the Proms this year. As it turned out, the music seemed to gain an extra set of legs(and teeth and arms and pincers!) from the greedy acoustic, and to play this work in this space proved to be an absolute career highlight. It was lovely to be paired up with fellow Holt-fanatic Thierry Fischer, and we had such a fascinating time teasing out the splinters of subtlety contained in this witty, boisterous and beautiful score. The solo movement was a splendid thing in the Albert Hall and I enjoyed bringing the whole thing down to a soothing stillness and out to full mania as the composer’s scope encourages. This concerto is a major blessing for contemporary music and I am so glad it also received some pretty epic reviews from this performance.

Cabrillo Music Festival- Higdon

I made my debut at the Cabrillo Festival in 1996 aged 19 playing the MacMillan concerto. I returned in 2000 to play the Rouse but this was my first time since that occasion, so it was with many elements of nostalgia that I found myself back in Surf City USA. This is a remarkable festival, made up entirely of contemporary music; this year, every composer who had a work played attended, including Turnage, Glass, Adams and my own and highly beloved Jennifer Higdon. The orchestra is made up of enthusiasts for new music and is a terrific group. Part of this festival experience is contributing in one’s own way to getting the word out to the public – and so it was that I found myself busking on a downtown metallic art-installation one night to get some publicity done for us all. You can verify this on Youtube as below!

I also had great experiences via my host, who treated me to walks in the redwoods, participation in a wine-making operation, and some great inside info on the hot spots to get good burritos, good coffee and good cocktails! I also had a surf lesson with Anna Clyne, which was terrific! I hope to take this forward somewhat in New Zealand next month – let’s see what happens!

Grand Teton Music Festival – Higdon

Okay – who thought of this one!!? Let’s place a major US orchestra at the centre of a high-end ski resort for seven weeks every summer in the most stunning and imposing surroundings imaginable!! Good on them, whoever they were for the Grand Teton Music Festival celebrates its 50th season next year – and I was mightily impressed with the entire experience this August. Wyoming is as spectacular a place as I ever saw – the Tetons themselves arranged in vast splendor before you even as you get off the plane(Jackson Hole is the only airport in the US situated in a National Park). This was a wonderful week of music making, and it was yet again such a thrill to play Jennifer’s piece, which got a standing ovation at the open dress rehearsal. The hall they have there is also extremely fine, and the opening marimba murmurs sounded better than ever. River trips, hikes and various wildlife encounters delighted our visit(I was joined by my girlfriend Kerenza on this trip!) and the McBean apartment, not long vacated by Stephen Hough, was an extremely comfy crash-pad in which to cook, sleep and sit in the rocking chair on the balcony looking at the stars.

Back in London now, I’m gearing up for my New Zealand trip, which also promises many great things, this time accompanied by my father. Congratulations to Huw Watkins and Alina Ibrgimova also, on the premiere of Huw’s Violin Concerto at the Proms which I was at last week. A great piece of music that inherits from Tippett and carries on somewhere else new and challenging.

Colin.

Chamber music collaborations see happy development too, with my first tour with The Miro Quartet in Austin and Washington DC, another tour of Harrison Birtwistle’s “The Axe manual” (paired with Maxwell Davies’ “Vesalii Icones”) in Scotland,  and the continuation of The Colin Currie Group’s work building on the elation of last year’s success at London’s South Bank Centre. Further adding to repertoire for percussion and string quartet,  I will premiere a new work by Michael Torke at the TROMP Festival in Eindhoven, “Mojave”, which will also exist in a version for marimba and orchestra. I’m also looking forward to various Bartok Sonata performances, with Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich in London’s Wigmore Hall, and a special event in Graz conceived by long-standing colleague Pierre-Laurent Aimard in which the Sonata will be aired alongside capricious adaptations of works by Eotvos, Ligeti, Reich and Kurtag.

September sees my debut with The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (as well as a holiday there with my father!) and I’m also very excited to be visiting The Grand Teton Music Festival for the first time too. My re-visit to The Cabrillo Festival will mean alot to me personally, having made my US debut there a full fourteen years ago. I can now count exactly 100 professional orchestras that I have collaborated with so far, and would like to thank Marin Alsop especially, for that debut all those years ago that led little by little to all these wonderful opportunities which I cherish so very much.

Enjoy!!

Colin.

Colin with Steve backstage after the February 2010 London concert!

On Tuesday 16th February, The Colin Currie Group with Synergy Vocals gave their first official concert at London’s South Bank Centre. The event was part of the International Chamber Music Series presented there and as such it was most refreshing and rewarding to be performing alongside the great string quartets and chamber musicians of our day. The group itself has been assembled, and now given an official name, as a statement of intent by its members to perform the music of Steve Reich at the highest level. Originally put together by me to perform a 70th birthday concert for the composer at the BBC Proms in 2006, I decided that the whole thing was just way too much fun and far too exciting to only do as a one-off. So, in discussion with my management at Intermusica, we have now pushed the project on to become a touring ensemble that will play various Reich works, but very often centred around the masterpiece from 1971 “Drumming”. On this occasion in London, we were thrilled to have Steve Reich present, and to offer him the (as it turned out) rare chance for him to hear the work from the audience’s perspective as he usually is up on stage himself taking part, playing with his own musicians. I’ll never forget his ecstatic reaction to our version and his generosity in going round each individual on stage during  the ovation to thank them in person – just a fantastic moment for us all.

In Birmingham’s Town Hall on the 20th, we repeated “Drumming” and also added in “Clapping Music”, “Nagoya Marimbas” and the glorious “Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ”. The ensemble sounded brilliant – it is an amazing line-up of players and an honour for me to have such fantastic percussion colleagues who are so dedicated and enthusiastic. We also tend to have rather a good time, with the just the right amount of jocularity – Sam Walton is always at the ready with that groan-worthy pun…and we give him plenty of material to work with!

As for Steve Reich and the chance to work on his repertoire, this really is a dream come true for me. I adore his music and have endless admiration for his unique creativity. His sense of timbre and harmony unite for something that is out of this world, and to perform “Drumming” especially really taps into something very deep and at the root of what it is to be a percussionist. We look forward to many more outings playing this and more of his works, truly one of the most special opportunities one can have as a performer of new music.

Thanks to everyone who made this launch so memorable – there are and will be many more concerts to follow as a result!

The result, to be debuted in London, Rotterdam, Tampere and Baltimore this season in a collection of premieres is a concerto of very great intensity and scope. The opening orchestral tutti, which returns twice more in the work at key moments, has a wonderful Sibelius-like sweep and sets up what remains throughout to be a harmonic language that is rich, exotic and evocative. Working at the piano with the full score at present, I am constantly charmed by the unexpected, the glowing chord substitutions and the tenacious bass notes which so pull at the superficially simple 7th chords perched atop. I’m very excited too by his ambitious use of the percussion; I have spent weeks getting to grips with the closing section of the first movement which requires me to play in constant alteration tubular bells, crotales and marimba, which will result in one of the strongest and most sonorous passages yet to feature in a percussion concerto.

I’m also thrilled to be presenting my own cadenza in this concerto; about two minutes in duration it takes a variety of harmonic and thematic elements from the concerto and develops them as best this percussionist can, having some fun en route and finally some reflection of his own at the end to link the music back to the final minute or so of the piece. (Studying the score also left me with an interesting observation, in that Rautavaara’s harmonies occasionally take on those of Balinese Gamelan music, so my cadenza also reflects that overlap too).

I urge all those in proximity to come along to these concerts and engage in what will be a fascinating re-thinking of the percussion concerto; this is am extremely stirring piece of music and one not to be missed at this, its very first stages of presentation where the excitement will be especially keen.

I look forward to meeting you at London’s Royal Festival Hall as well as any of the other venues in question throughout the course of this season…

Best wishes, Colin.