THE PING'S THE THING

Time was when percussionists were confined to the orchestra’s nether regions, like servants. Then came Evelyn Glennie, to free them with her blazing charisma. Skip a generation and Glennie has an equally charismatic successor: in the next two months Colin Currie (above) will be ubiquitous, with a string of premieres on disc and in concert halls on both sides of the Atlantic. This 35-year-old Scot may be able to raise the roof, but he can also mightily intrigue, as in his 2010 Proms premiere of Simon Holt’s idiosyncratic “a table of noises”, in which he created a series of enchanting musical worlds with the aid of taut, terse, high-pitched pings and pocks from wood, skin and metal.

The articulate Currie, who is also a professor at the Royal Academy, has spent the last decade giving the lie to the commonly held assumption that percussionists are just a bunch of noisy extroverts. He has opened up the discipline to incorporate sounds from Cuba, central Africa and Japan, and, using his ensemble the Colin Currie Group, he has encouraged composers to regard percussion as a routine part of the chamber-music armoury. Steve Reich’s “Drumming” is one of the classics he often plays, and Reich is now composing a new piece expressly for him.