Entering Cadogan Hall for Evelyn Glennie’s performance, audience members were offered earplugs. This playfully reinforced a stereotype: percussion instruments are all noise, incapable of the subtlety that should be left to more traditional melodic instruments. Think again. In a concert to celebrate her 50th birthday, Dame Evelyn Glennie demonstrated the expressive range of various percussion instruments, one of which had been in existence for only two years.
[…][In Keiko Abe’s Prims Rhapsody] the music was split equally between Glennie and pianist Philip Smith. […] Displaying organic, rich chords, as well very soft melodic runs, Glennie’s marimba at times challenged what we have come to expect of its accompanying piano: the two instruments traded places, the marimba becoming more melodic, the piano reminding us that it is itself a percussion instrument.
And then Glennie challenged what we have come to expect from instruments in general. In Orologeria aureola, co-written by the performer and Philip Sheppard, Glennie played a halo: a flying saucer-like steel handpan which was propped between her knees and a stool. Struck with the palms, it was similar in tone to a steel drum, with a slow, resonant pitch-bend to its echo.
Twenty-three-year-old Bertram Wee’s Dithyrambs was composed for the aluphone. […] The piece and Glennie’s playing were thrilling. As she highlighted in a short introduction, there was a freedom to playing on such a new instrument: no-one has figured out the ways it shouldn’t be played. Here Glennie struck it with beaters, hands, knuckles and nails, working from a mild glockenspiel sound to a more abrasive gong.
But it was a longer piece by John Psathas […] that gave Glennie a platform to explore the true possibilities of percussive playing. A shimmer of silver dress and silver hair, she turned from the marimba and chimes to a full kit. […] Her performance was mesmerising and deeply sensitive. It also in some way showed percussion to have advantages over other melodic instruments. Glennie went beyond octaves, and the earplugs given out at the beginning were safe in their plastic pouches.
Percussion: Evelyn Glennie
Piano: Philip Smith
BBC Proms Chamber Music 4, Cadogan Hall, London
10 August 2015