The Stevens Center stage is overflowing with the numerous and diverse percussion instruments of Western classical music.
Dame Evelyn Glennie has come to town to perform Joseph Schwantner’s Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra with the Winston-Salem Symphony. The program, which Robert Moody conducted Saturday in Wait Chapel at Wake Forest University and yesterday afternoon at the Stevens Center, also includes Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks and Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night.
Schwantner composed the concerto in 1992 to celebrate the New York Philharmonic’s 150th anniversary. In it, no instrument seems to have been overlooked. The result is a feast of faintly jazzy extremes.
There is, for example, the large and thunderously loud bass drum. There’s the small, soft and delicate triangle. And there’s something in between, requiring mallets to move with precision up and down a keyboard-like series of pitches of a marimba.
Whatever the instrument is, Glennie strikes it with mastery and unbridled relish. Our ears perk up and our bodies can’t stop moving to all the infectious rhythm. The way she plays is so physical, involved and dazzling that it simply must be seen.
Her stick work is often so breathtakingly fast and furious that it seems inspired by the late Tito Puente, a Latin-jazz artist with no equals. But the thrill of all this visceral excitement never comes at the expense of engaging and colorful subtlety - as when, for example, Glennie “brushes” the top of a drum, or rubs a double-bass bow on a vibraphone.
Space limitations preclude a strike-by-strike description in all that goes on in this concerto, which is written in a three-movement arch-like design. But two sections merit mention: a elegiac “In Memoriam” movement, written in honor of the late Stephen Albert, and a high-energy cadenza at the work’s conclusion, in which Glennie improvises up a storm.
The concert’s first half consists of the music by Strauss and Schoenberg, both popular tone poems. Transfigured Night, a work for a chamber orchestra of strings, comes off glowingly, despite its many difficulties.
I think you’ll enjoy, too, the written descriptions that accompany the tone poems on a screen above the stage. They give meaning to the music, making quite vivid and clearer what might otherwise seem hopelessly vague.
By Ken Keuffel
memoriam
in memoriam
