From Flower Pots to Snare Drums

Forty-three year-old Scottish musician Evelyn Glennie is a pioneer among classical percussionists: she is one of the first to achieve fame as a solo performer. And her talents are not constrained to conventional percussion instruments. In this concert filmed at the Munich Summer Piano Festival, Glennie gracefully coaxes an astonishing range of sounds and colors out of an array of percussive instruments ranging from flower pots to snare drums.

Watching Glennie's lithe virtuosity, it's hard to believe that she has been profoundly deaf since childhood, and also that her musical skill is a relatively recent specialism, in light of more established orchestral instruments like the violin.  When Pierre Boulez wrote complex works for percussion in the 1950s, he initially had difficulty finding musicians whose technique was advanced enough to play them.

The Japanese marimba player Keiko Abe, Glennie's mentor and one of the first people to bring the marimba into the spotlight, gave groundbreaking solo recitals in Tokyo in the late 1960s and early '70s. A highlight of the Munich event is Glennie's performance of Abe's shimmering Michi. She starts by caressing a single note, which builds in intensity to a colorful frenzy - the whirlwind interspersed with more subdued, melancholic interludes.

Glennie has made significant contributions to the percussion repertory, commissioning works from composers including James MacMillan, Richard Rodney Bennett, Thea Musgrave and John McLeod, whose jazz-tinged duo, Song of Dionysius, is featured here. Performing alongside Philip Smith, Glennie moves fluently between piano, marimba and drum set.

The concert also includes Askell Masson's Prim for snare drum - during which Glennie's mallets blur over the instrument with dizzying flair. In Frederic Rzewski's To the Earth, Glennie elicits a myriad of colors and textures out of four tuned flower pots, kneeling over them while she recites a text from the 7^th century poem, "To The Earth Mother of All."

The concert concludes with the colorful four-movement Concerto for Marimba by the Brazilian composer Ney Rosauro, which encompasses jazzy hues and lively melodies. Smith accompanies Glennie on the piano during the work, which was originally scored for strings and marimba.

With Glennie, formerly underdog instruments like the marimba have now come of age - featured with increasing frequency in festivals and solo recitals. Watching the artist in this concert is a reminder of her dynamic role in bringing percussion into the spotlight.

Picture by Getty Images.