Shake, Rattle & Roll at the University Music Theatre

By WILLIAM DART

Two-and-a-half hours is a long time to spend in a concert hall to hear less than an hour of actual music; and this is what happened at the University of Auckland Percussion Ensemble's presentation.

The main liability was an opening "timpani workshop" by the Auckland Philharmonia's Vadim Simongauz. It was, in fact, a lecture. While Simongauz is a top-notch timpanist in concert, listening to "extracts" from the great masterworks interspersed with self-effacing commentary was tedious.

I pray a desperate castanet clacker doesn't take a lead from this precedent.

Lenny Sakofsky presented the rest of the programme with a droll running commentary, delivered, alas, against the distraction and clatter of setting up the various items. Programme notes would have been more useful.

A Rock Etude by Bill Douglas and Michael Udow had more to do with Stravinsky than rock, although it was an enthusiastic "warm-up" for the young musicians. At the other end of the concert Christopher Rouse's Ogoun Boudris, a self-described "dance of appeasement" for a bloodthirsty Haitian god, stirred up the decibels. Rouse has used words such as "highly erotic" and "brutally sexual" in his own description of the piece but these qualities were not conveyed in this careful, academic delivery. What should have been a primal shriek was lost in the mix.

The absence of any New Zealand music was lamentable, but two older American works justified the evening. Lou Harrison, who died this year at the grand old age of 85, once said that every community should have its gamelan, and the sounds of Indonesia certainly infiltrate his 1941 The Song of Quetzalcoatl. Under Sakofsky's baton, it proved to be an appropriately shimmering tribute to the Aztec Sun God.

David Nalden has given us Harrison's Concerto for Violin and Percussion before. This is a fascinating piece, with Milo tins in the line-up alongside the more kosher percussion instruments. It's a concerto that's not afraid to be simple, still generating quite a bit of drama as Nalden tenaciously pursued the lyrical against smouldering and flickering percussion. Conductor Peter Scholes kept a difficult score on the rails, although occasionally the balance was not what it should have been.