Sally Beamish's new percussion concerto, Trance o Nicht, is inspired by a world of natural extremes: the harshness of the unremitting Arctic winter, the celestial display of the northern lights, and the transcendent moment when the sun returns to give warmth. But in Evelyn Glennie's British premiere performance with the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by James MacMillan, this promising starting material resulted only in an insipid, decorative showpiece for the soloist, with none of the elemental power suggested by its inspiration.
Beamish casts Glennie not just as a percussion soloist but also as a speaker: she recites Beamish's own poems, specially written in Glennie's native north-east Scottish dialect. Triggering electronic samples of her voice, she creates an expressive counterpoint for her playing, conjuring musical images of "Mirk" ("Dark") in the first movement, with meandering marimba lines, before the "glittering graffiti" of the second, in which cymbals, bells and string harmonics depict the northern lights. Beamish's music is always effective, but never achieves that mysterious alchemy where musical structure becomes a vivid poetry in its own right. Instead of a vital, exuberant return to life in the final movement, the end sounded merely like a limp pastiche of a Shostakovich scherzo.
The other new piece was John Woolrich's arrangement of three Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas for Glennie and the orchestra. There were some Stravinsky-like touches in Woolrich's score - a mysterious passage connecting the slow, central sonata with the final piece, or a wild interjection for double-basses - but the delicacy of these reworkings was compromised by Glennie's lumpen phrasing and idiosyncratic dynamics. She could not match the lightness of touch of the orchestral playing, turning the subtlety of Scarlatti's pieces into a soloistic spectacle. The programme was framed by MacMillan's performances of Mendelssohn - a rough-edged Hebrides Overture and charmless Italian Symphony. Each had to compete with the hiss of the PA system. Amplification is one thing in Beamish; in Mendelssohn it is ruinous.
· At Wiltshire Music Centre, Bradford-on-Avon (01225 860100), tomorrow. Then touring.
