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Colin Currie and Clive Driskill-Smith, Westminster Abbey, London, UK
10th June, 2003
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This year, thanks to the enterprise of its artistic director James O'Donnell, there has been a radical change in the format of Westminster Abbey's annual organ festival. Now it's called Mixtures, because the six concerts, unevenly spread between late April and early July, pair the organ with something else. This recital brought together organist Clive Driskill-Smith and percussionist Colin Currie, stars of a new generation.
It's not the ideal instrumental combination. Because the organ tends to sustain sound and percussion instruments tend not to, the two sound-worlds stay entirely apart, forever mutually exclusive. None of the pieces heard last night seemed consciously to explore that division, though a new work commissioned for the occasion, Dave Maric's Borrowed Time, perhaps came closest. Maric took pains to ensure that the organ writing was carefully subdued beneath the patterns that Currie played on marimba before shifting the balance gradually in the organ's favour. And in the second half of the piece, where the vibraphone takes the marimba's role in a kind of surreal echo, he achieved something genuinely atmospheric.
Otherwise, the five movements of Czech organist-composer Petr Eben's Landscapes of Patmos (1964), which refer to images from the Book of Revelation, was harmonically piquant if sometimes tiresomely melodramatic. American William Bolcom's brash, eclectic Black Host of 1967 came complete with a passage of rag that made the huge organ sound like something from a fairground. But the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina's Detto 1 had at its heart both an appealing immediacy and an earnestly contemplative spirit.
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