He wanted to avoid the reckless flamboyance of many a percussion concerto and decided that the soloist’s instruments should be few enough (glockenspiel, whistle, block, bongo, klaxon, cowbell) to fit on a table, though he also has a xylophone and sits on his cajon. The restraint pays off. One can follow the solo line, unpitched though it mostly is, more clearly than often in such pieces. In other ways, the music is unbridled, favouring the sonic extremes of piccolo and contrabassoon, and dispensing with the normative presence of violins and violas. The arresting opening is a raucous duo for the percussionist and a pair of spiky piccolos, and the 10th of the 11 brief movements is a bass-clarinet solo, one of five interludes called “ghosts”. This overlaps with movement nine, “table top”, a cadenza where the soloist chooses freely among his instruments.
The titles of the main movements all relate to Uncle Ash: the first movement is “jute”, the stuffing for the animal skins; the third “fly”, the name of his dog, “who used to fall asleep standing while staring into the fire”. Here, the soloist plays an elaborate, “spectral” xylophone part, gently backed by two orchestral xylophones, and the striking combination is used again, more equitably, in the frenetic “skennin’ Mary”, about a neigh-bour whose glass eye was wont to spin when she was angry. Uncle Ash’s supply of such appurtenances for animals provides the lurid title of “a drawer full of eyes”, a brittle scherzo. Uncles, eccentric or otherwise, make good subjects for artists, for they can be observed in close-up, like parents, but without the blur of Oedipal tensions. Holt has produced one of his most likeable and subtly coloured scores.
