Last week was a treat if you enjoy hearing, or even watching, people hitting things. The 2008 Taipei International Percussion Convention (台北國際打擊樂節) has been in town and a huge variety of instruments, and body parts, have been stuck with determination and skill.
The convention included 10 concerts held over the past week in Taipei, with some of the groups also performing in Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung.
According to Lin Peilan (林霈蘭), Ju Percussion Group’s (朱宗慶打擊樂團) executive director, tickets sold reasonably well for the Taipei performances compared to central and southern Taiwan.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF JU PERCUSSION GROUP
Percossa, a group from the Netherlands, attracted a large audience, but the four young Dutch performers, with their roots in street theater, were always going to be popular. They certainly lived up to their reputation last Tuesday with a show that mixed showmanship with musical virtuosity.
A little piece called Wacky Boomster, in which a simple tune was played on a row of hollow plastic tubes of different lengths, along with plenty of onstage antics that involved the performers hitting each other to key notes, had the audience in hysterics, as did Niet Wokken and Body, in which scat, clapping and the beating of thighs, cheeks and chests were used to create skillful and humorous segments.
The youthful audience responded enthusiastically. The very good-looking Odaiko Percussion Group from Spain had high school girls swooning at an after-concert autograph session. Unfortunately, the group’s performance didn’t have quite the same effect. Odaiko tried to mix it up with pieces drawing inspiration from around the world, but the shifts through ethnic genres fell rather flat. The most successful piece, titled Jose, was heavily influenced by flamenco sounds and was more convincing than the troupe’s attempts to create Latin and African vibes.
Lin said groups such as Les Percussions de Strasbourg, which exist at the cutting edge of contemporary music, met with a mixed reception. Their presence in Taipei was a coup for the organizers. “For people like us with a formal training in music, it was stunning,” Lin said in an interview prior to a concert by the Israeli duo PercaDu at the National Concert Hall, “but for the general public, it was too difficult. Their music is not very accessible.”
Glad that I hadn’t attended the highly touted Les Percussions de Strasbourg concert, I found myself overwhelmed by PercaDu, which performed Friday. The duo performed a mixed program that combined musical virtuosity and showmanship. Gyro, a composition for two drum kits by performer Tomer Yariv, the last piece before two encores, received a standing ovation led by the members of the other percussion groups in the audience. Another piece, Fingertips, penned by Israeli composer Yehezkei Raz for the duo and performed on a hang, a steel instrument that resembles a wok with a lid, a kalimbas, which is a pot-like drum from the Ebo people in Africa, and the dumbek, a common drum used by the desert people in the Middle East, was intensely intimate and filled the auditorium’s huge space.
The lack of greater publicity for outstanding groups such as PercaDu, which deserved a bigger audience than it got, suggests that more could have been done by the organizers to draw attention to the event. The huge numbers of enthusiastic music students at the concerts, and the energy with which they pursued autographs from performers, suggests that while Ju Percussion could do more to market these performances to the general public, it is certainly building up a strong and enthusiastic fan base for the next Taipei International Percussion Convention in three years time.
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