As soloist, he [Hugo Ticciati] had no fear of comparisons here with the ever-phenomenal Evelyn Glennie. Those passages in Jill Jarman’s Mindstream where the violin sparred with marimba and vibraphone ricochets felt like white-heat improvisation – we could have done with even more of that between the two. Improvisation there was, for all the strings glissan doing into what sounded like Dowland. That followed Glennie’s breathtaking opener, Prim, a solo for snare drum composed by Iceland’s top composer Áskell Másson.

Jarman’s first-half main event was fitful in a way that the awkwardly-expressed premise advising us to live in the moment maybe hadn’t contemplated: meandering Piazzolla-lite moodiness punctuated by syncopated, jazzy, dancing brilliance. It was entirely thanks to the rhythmic knife-cut of all involved that the dances, and above all the buzzing last minutes, worked so well.

The real mindfulness-meditation sequence would have been Glennie’s tam-tam solo after the interval, notated in James Tenney’s Having Never Written a Note for Percussion as a single-note crescendo and diminuendo over 12 or so minutes. What broke the spell not long into the near-silence were coughs, sneezes, whispers and what sounded like exploding temperance beverages: you had to laugh when you needed to be entirely focused on the infinite variety of timbres and overtones Glennie could produce by moving her two sponged sticks over the surface of the instrument.

Kings Place, London
27 April 2016