‘I’ve had this idea,’” Steven Logan says, recalling a conversation with composer Claire Scholes. “‘I really want to write you a xylophone arrangement of Dem Bones.’”
Scholes’s music is frequently playful – see, for example her Drag Concerto, which premiered last year with trumpeter Nick Hall dressed as his alter ego, Anita Wigl’it. Scholes’s new arrangement of the old spiritual contains some theatricality, too. “I get to shout and whoop and it’s so much fun,” Logan says.
Dem Bones is among the pieces Logan is taking on a brief northern tour with flautist Luca Manghi and pianist David Kelly. Orchestral concertgoers will know Logan as principal timpanist for the Auckland Philharmonia (Manghi is associate principal flute).
However, as well as playing the full gamut of percussion – and other – instruments, he acts and sings, and he and a few of his orchestral colleagues have an R&B band, which may or may not reflect a childhood growing up in the US southeast: Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky. He didn’t grow up in New Jersey but he loves Bruce Springsteen, and has a tattoo of the piano part to The Boss’s Thunder Road to prove it.
There is no Springsteen on the tour the trio are calling Masterworks for Marimba, Flute, & Piano, but people can expect other musical greats, including Fauré, Bernstein and Mozart, none of whom were noted for their marimba, flute and piano music.
“[Mozart’s] Fantasia [k.608] was written for organ, and we arranged it to work for the three of us,” Logan says. “I opened it up in [composition software] Sibelius and I was like, this makes sense. That’s obviously a flute line and this is obviously a piano line. That’s obviously a marimba line. So, we are playing the notes as they are, but we found cool ways to use our combination of colours to rearrange the piece.”
There’s a selection of works by local composers, too, this time written to glove-fit the ensemble. Logan is especially excited by Cloud Piercer, a marimba solo written for him by Hannah Kagawa. A student at the University of Canterbury, Kagawa has been learning percussion with Justin DeHart, and is a young composer to keep an eye on.
“Yesterday, I was practising it and I’d got to the point where, okay, I’ve done the work I need to do. But then for another 45 minutes I kept playing the piece, just because it’s beautiful.” The cloud piercer of the title is Aoraki Mt Cook. “It feels like a love letter to the landscape,” says Logan, who recently became a New Zealand citizen. “What’s more Kiwi than having a Kiwi composer write about the landscape?”
Masterworks for Marimba, Flute, & Piano, Christ Church Parish Hall, Russell, Aug 20; St Heliers Church & Community Hall, Auckland, Aug 31; Gallagher Academy Concert Chamber, Hamilton, Sept 10.
