Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
February 23, 2018

Ian Cleworth shot brief, staccato fragments from the Japanese kanade-okedo drum into the dimly lit concert hall, the hard attacks left in the air to decay into silence. The Artistic Director and co-founder of Taikoz – who spent 20 years as Principal Percussion with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra – opened this collaboration between his old band and his new, Taikoz and the SSO, with his own composition Waves for solo kanade-okedo. Full of driving beats and pulsing polyrhythms playing out on either side of the drum (one side is higher in pitch, the other lower), Cleworth’s performance was a high-intensity primer for a concert exploring the concept of Ma, a word without a direct English equivalent that can mean “the space between tangible entities” or “space that forms part of the whole”. There was certainly a magic to the decay and silence between the sounds he wrought with the kanade-okedo, the attacks ricocheting off the walls and ceiling behind the audience.

Kaoru Watanabe. Photo: supplied

Guest artist Kaoru Watanabe’s two works on the programs opened with gentler textures but soon harnessed...