In tune with the sounds of her silence

By Tara Werner

Evelyn Glennie is one of that most rare breed, an internationally renowned solo percussionist. As well, she is profoundly deaf.

Her return to Auckland for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Concert Season 2000 will be a real drawcard, especially since she will be premiering Gareth Farr's Hikoi in September.

It's very easy to warm to this unassuming and gentle-mannered musician, who lip-reads with skill and has the knack of relaxing people with down-to-earth selfconfidence.

Natural rhythm seems to be second nature to Glennie who, on her previous visits to New Zealand, impressed with performances that combined raw percussive power and technique with musicianship and sensitivity.

Graduating from the Royal Academy of Music with its highest award, she soon made history by being the first solo percussionist to perform at the Proms, which she did to much acclaim in 1989.

There is no doubt that she loves talking percussion and when her favourite instrument, the marimba, is mentioned she positively sparks. She is acknowledged to be a world leader on the instrument, a true virtuoso.

Other soloists in the 12-concert season, the first under music director James Judd, include cellist Raphael Wallfisch and pianists Michael Houstoun and Konstantin Lifschitz.

Houstoun will be joined by Marion Horsburgh on the bagpipes in an unusual concert in June, featuring Maxwell Davies' An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise.

Though music from Orkney may not be the top of most people's list, many works in the Great Classics series on Friday nights will be familiar. They include Dvorak's New World Symphony, Greig's piano concerto and Elgar's cello concerto.

Probably one of the most popular programmes will be the first concert in the series, since it includes Holst's The Planets.

Gustav Holst's daughter, Imogen, was pretty tough on her father's most famous work. In her biography, written in 1951, 18 years after the composer's death, she wrote matter-of-factly: "Listening to The Planets is a perplexing experience. The work is so uneven that it is almost impossible to believe the same mind was responsible for the whole of the 55 minutes of music."

She continued, even more pointedly: "Many critics, suffering from the pain inflicted by its weakest moments, find it difficult to tolerate the work, and protest that it is nothing but a 'mausoleum.' But it has not sunk to such depths as that. The great moments survive in spite of the irrelevancies that surround them."

Others definitely did not agree with her initial assessment. The Planets has become Holst's most popular piece, one of the best known in the orchestral repertoire.

Another concert series, Sounding the Century, on Saturday nights, is a little more adventurous, with 20th-century classics such as Mahler's Ninth Symphony, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony.

An important part of the series will be a composition in each concert by one of the six finalists in the Concert FM/NZSO Music Prize. These works by New Zealand composers will be judged by the concert-goers, who can vote after each performance along with the Concert FM audience.

One of the blockbusters in Sounding the Century is Mahler's Symphony No 9, which opens the first concert. It is likely to elicit strong emotions.

The symphony finishes with a long adagio that plunges into the depths of despair and nostalgic resignation, yet ends with an extremely positive affirmation of life.

When Mahler started on this work in 1909 he had a possibly fatal heart condition. He was deeply superstitious because no great composer had ever lived to write a 10th symphony, and he had serious misgivings about completing the piece.

He saw the Ninth as a very personal musical valediction and the music became a psychological working-out of his attitudes towards his own mortality.

He never conducted the Ninth in his lifetime. He died soon after starting his 10th symphony, which remained unfinished.