REVIEW: PercaDu with Anchorage Symphony

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Posted: October 24, 2009 - 11:28 pm

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By Mike Dunham

The Anchorage Symphony Orchestra opened its season with a concert that included only the third American performance of a curious work for percussion and orchestra. “Spices, Perfumes, Toxins,” was created by contemporary Israeli composer Avner Dorman as a showpiece for the duo of Tomer Yariv and Adi Morag, aka PercaDu.

The three-movement piece is notably “accessible” — to use the code word for modern music that numbers of listeners will find more entertaining than perplexing. The piece begins with a persistent motor rhythm on two marimbas, which are the most prominent instruments in the score. (One of these full-size devices had to be shipped up from Seattle for Dorman’s work.) Aside from an episode of dueling drum sets, the marimbas dominate the first movement, “Spices;” each movement supposedly represents one of the nouns in the title.

However, there’s a lot of sameness in this movement, an effect of the unbroken rhythm drummed out on marimbas, a dulcet instrument but somewhat limited in timbre — like a meal where the only spice is cilantro.

A sour dissonant interval in the brass stops the action cold, builds into a cloud of sound and resolves to start the second
movement. “Perfumes” has an altogether lovely feel, with delicious triplets and a meditative fade at the end.

“Toxins” served mainly as a format for virtuosity, featuring more drums and cymbals in a chain of excited flurries. But I didn’t get a sense of building to a climax. It was more as if the movement started at the climax and stayed there until the composer ran out of paper and stopped.

The showmanship proved to be a big crowd-pleaser. The PercaDudes returned for two encores, some Bach and “The Flight of the Bumble Bee.” The latter featured some amusing physical interchanges between the two, working on one instrument, but the playing seemed musically sloppy in comparison to the main attraction and the Bach.

Also on the program were Verdi’s Overture to “I Vespri Siciliani,” in which the lower strings played particularly well, as they would throughout the night. The brass and winds delivered good performances for Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Conductor Randall Craig Fleischer made the most of the latent psychosis in the first movement, with a sense of rhythmic imbalance. The constant pizzicato notes of the Scherzo came out clear and audible.

Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.

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