The Washington Post
March 26, 2005 Saturday
Music
[parts omitted]
We don’t get enough all-percussion concerts, despite the fact that
today’s wide-ranging percussion ensembles can provide hypnotic
melodies in addition to hard grooves and explosive outbursts. So it
was enterprising of Strathmore’s Art After Hours series to host a
concert by Ko’mm Percussion in the mansion on Wednesday night. The
group, consisting of local percussionists Leon Khoja-Eynatyan,
Richard McCandless, Rich O’Meara and Joseph Jay McIntyre, presented
works by the latter three.
Three of the eight works Ko’mm played stood out. The mesmerizing
minimalist-style marimba arpeggios of O’Meara’s “Island Spinning”
wobbled dangerously after some subtle metrical twists, but the piece
righted itself like a top given an extra spin. O’Meara followed that
with “301,” a work commemorating the official conversion of Armenia
to Christianity, in which Khoja-Eynatyan played breathtakingly quiet
ruminations on the marimba as his daughter Tatevik rang an Armenian
hymn on hand bells. The concert ended with a piece by McCandless
called “Pile Driver,” which he introduced with the half-boast “This
piece is not subtle,” but the poetry McCandless found in the
cacophony made “Pile Driver” absorbing.
Yet even the less successful pieces were interesting; for example,
the world premiere of McIntyre’s “Negative” found the composer using
real mallets to strike a nonexistent drum, cuing two bass drums
behind him to stop rumbling and thus “playing” silence. The
reverberations of the drums prevented the silence from cutting
sharply through sound, but it was fun to see the idea tried. And as
the members of Ko’mm worked hard to make the music sound good, they
proved that the sheer athletic spectacle of a percussion concert can
be a lot of fun to watch.
— Andrew Lindemann Malone