One definition of music, without heaving into a lecture, is “organised sound”. The title of the latest series at Kings Place, Sound Unwrapped, could have applied to any of its 14 year-long editions to date. The 2023 season, impressive in its ambitions, burst into action last weekend with a sonic display of startling magnificence: the four drummers of the Colin Currie Quartet, cast asunder like the four winds, performed from each corner of Hall One’s gallery. The air reverberated, around and above. A streamlined, pale-oak auditorium of the 21st century became a place of arcane code and ancient ritual.
The work was John Luther Adams’s Qilyaun (1998). A listener may not know, less care, that it is written as a four-part canon and a palindrome. The title refers to an Alaska shaman’s drum, a vehicle for spirit journeys. All that mattered, in the moment, was the way the rolls and rumbles ebbed and flowed, now louder, now softer, as if thunder had travelled between each bass drum, each set of sticks, each dazzling player. As well as Currie himself, the quartet comprises Owen Gunnell, Adrian Spillett and Sam Walton.
