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.
