The South Bank's annual Rhythm Sticks Festival is devoted not to a star, but to the tradition and languages of the world's percussion music. Rather than encouraging them simply to play their album-promotions, the festival regularly hurls some of the most creative percussionists in the business into open situations with unfamiliar partners.

On the opening night, the star was Giovanni Hidalgo, the 37-year-old Puerto Rican widely regarded now as the world's best conga player. He performed as an unaccompanied soloist, as part of an impromptu four-piece percussion ensemble, and more or less as contented sideman in a jamming Latin ensemble that eventually had the entire audience of the QEH on its feet and gyrating.

His resourcefulness and range of sound from an orthodox conga set and assorted percussion props is breathtaking. Sometimes his playing suggests a herd of galloping horses, sometimes scores of pattering feet. Then he toys with drum-melodies, almost idly struck patterns of sounds using the tunings of the congas, periodically bent in pitch by the robust application of the elbow.

Hidalgo's sound has a remarkable softness and pliability as well as power - and at times a liquidity and force at once, like torrential rain on a roof. The chattering sounds he makes with his nails echoes the flying rhythms of Indian as much as Latin music. Hidalgo played a long unaccompanied solo in each half, and had loosened so much by the second one that he seemed ready to go on all night. There would have been plenty of support for it.