Michael Dervan reviews 4-MALITY Percussion Quartet B of I Arts Centre, Dublin

4-MALITY Percussion Quartet

B of I Arts Centre, Dublin

The percussion ensemble is a relatively recent arrival. Stravinsky's Les noces gave a foretaste of possibilities in the 1920s, and the 1933 première of Varèse's Ionisation, with its 13 players and over three dozen instruments, changed the landscape forever.

Things moved more quickly after the second World War, but the fact that in 1965 the then four-year-old ensemble Les Percussions de Strasbourg was able to present an all-percussion programme still merits a special mention in The New Grove.

The Strasbourg group attracted interest from composers of the stature of Boulez, Messiaen and Xenakis, and other groups which followed have also shaped their identities through the music they have chosen to play.

4-MALITY, formed by Adrian Spillett, the first percussionist to become BBC Musician of the Year back in 1998, opened its Music Network tour with a programme that leaned heavily on percussionist composers, including three individual members of the group and a piece jointly credited to all four.

The most interesting work, however, was the new commission from Belfast composer Brian Irvine, whose cheeky Odd Ball engages in quirky fantasies triggered by (or at least which the composer explains by) five sometimes dotty scenarios. Irvine has a sense of humour that takes him into areas where others might fear to tread - so much so that one of the performers corpsed under the strain. In Odd Ball he has managed to provide five distinctive slants within a piece which showed a clear fondness for mechanical processes à la Ligeti, variously disturbed by entropy.

Elsewhere in the evening, which included pieces by group members Geir Rafnsson (Ykjur), Stephen Whibley (Monsoon and Sade) and Jan Bradley (In-Line) as well as works by fellow percussionists Ney Rosauro (Bem-Vindo), Keiko Abe (Conversations in a Forest IV) and Eric Sammut, (Extreme Ice Cream) the emphasis was on individual and collective virtuosity.

Think of Liszt putting pianists through their paces in his operatic paraphrases or fantasias and you'll be on the right track. The 4-MALITY players take the theatricality of percussion performance as a gift to be seized on, and their show runs with a slick, well-oiled purr behind the blur of mallets and the finely co-ordinated drills.

The pieces they play may be mostly forgettable from a musical point of view. But the high-impact performances are well worth sampling for their own sake.

• Tours to Drogheda tonight, Moate (Sun), Clifden (Mon), Castlebar (Tues), Omagh (Thurs) and Armagh (Fri). Details from 01-671 9429.