Unlike much of the orchestral music he performs, percussion soloist Colin Currie was not premiering Olga Neuwirth’s epic concerto Trurliade – Zone Zero. The work was written for the Lucerne festival almost a decade ago, but this was its first UK performance, and it might have been tailor-made for Currie’s adventurous musicianship.
Neuwirth, the Austrian composer of a work based on David Lynch’s film Lost Highway and an opera of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, turned to the mid-1960s satirical science fiction of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem and a story about a robot on the rampage for her inspiration. A platform packed to capacity with instruments and players had been extended into the auditorium for Currie’s three stations of gongs, drums and cymbals – tuned percussion very much a junior partner to noise-making kit.
These instruments were initially rubbed and scraped as much as bashed, in an enormous vocabulary of mechanical sound. The soloist was never still, his feet employed as often as four-mallet hands and small cymbals used to hit larger ones.
Behind him an enormous orchestra – with six very busy orchestral percussionists, Wagner tubas, contrabass clarinet and tenor saxophone added to the winds – was also multitasking. The flutes and clarinets doubled on swanee whistles and other toys, horn-players palmed their mouthpieces in a steady pulse and the front desks of the strings picked up hand percussion.
There was a joy in all this chaos, in recognisable evocations of a madcap cartoon chase, or fairground cacophony. The violas became a gate swinging on its hinges, and a step-by-step chromatic scale in the winds was answered by super-fast repeated phrases from the soloist. This runaway machine was still, somehow, just under human control, so when Currie eventually played the opening of gospel hymn We Shall Overcome, it was as much affirmative as amusing.
Estonian conductor Mihhail Gerts, in at short notice for Ilan Volkov, was a meticulous guide through the complex score. This was a tough programme to step into, the concerto followed by an equally authoritatively directed account of Prokofiev’s brooding, ambiguous Symphony No 6 and preceded by the same composer’s youthful but still dark-toned Autumnal Sketch.
• Available on BBC Sounds until 7 March.
