On 16 May ANAM Percussion, led by Peter Neville, head of the Percussion Faculty, leads the national debut of Danny Elfman’s Percussion Quartet. It is presented alongside music by Julia Wolfe and Stewart Copeland, in a celebration of American music for percussion ensemble.
The 20-minute quartet, cast in four movements, reflects Elfman’s formative experiences encountering the music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Harry Partch, with the work exploring the superimposition of various pulsing layers throughout. The metal orchestras of Indonesian gamelan and West Africa also make their mark on Elfman’s instrumental palette, along with pentatonic harmonies inspired by those same traditions.
It was composed after Glass invited Elfman to compose a companion piece for his work Perpetulum at the Days and Nights Festival in Big Sur, California, who commissioned the piece. “I had to ponder it over for 1.3 seconds before agreeing”, Elfman says. Third Coast Percussion premiered the quartet in 2019; to date they have given 28 performances of the work. Watch a film of them performing the piece here.
Third Coast Percussion and Danny Elfman are a match made in heaven. The American composer's scintillating approach to rhythm and orchestral colour is showcased in a dazzling Percussion Quartet…
BBC Music Magazine (Michael Beek), August 2022
Onetime rockstar, now full-time film composer Danny Elfman has been making inroads into the concert hall with variable success, and his rather pleasing new Percussion Quartet marks the first time that he has written for this configuration. He goes about it in the timeworn format that Haydn and Beethoven would have recognized — a four-movement (fast, slow, scherzo, finale) structure lasting 20 minutes.
The movements launch with what sound like homages to Philip Glass or Steve Reich — repeated minimalist patterns in their styles — yet they all find their way out of the initial repetition machine with a firm grip upon tonality. Among the eclectic details that come and go quickly, look out for a brief riff from the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” near the start of the second movement, a Latin element surfacing late in the scherzo, and some lightly applied Balinese scales in the finale.
San Francisco Classical Voice (Richard S Ginell), 27 June 2022
In Danny Elfman’s entertaining, finely structured Percussion Quartet there are moments of poetry and, in the last movement, a spectral haunting with chimes.
Gramophone (Laurence Vittes), August 2022