China Beijing Music Festival – Andy Akiho, Seven Pillars: Sandbox Percussion: Ian Rosenbaum, Jonny Allen, Terry Sweeney, Victor Caccese. Forbidden City Concert Hall, Beijing, 11.10.2024. (TS)
Seven Pillars by US composer Andy Akiho is not a piece for the faint of heart. Anyone who hadn’t known that before would be in no doubt following this performance at the Forbidden City Concert Hall as part of this year’s Beijing Music Festival. An eighty-minute wall of sound, it was a showcase of supreme virtuosity, grit and groove by Sandbox Percussion, comprising – Ian Rosenbaum, Jonny Allen, Terry Sweeney and Victor Caccese. The Brooklyn-based quartet commissioned it and whose 2021 recording of it was nominated for a Grammy Award.
While the standard kit – vibraphone, marimba, bass drum et al. – had been hired locally, the Sandbox boys had flown halfway across the world with the rest, including glass bottles and sets of tuned metal pipes. They also brought with them a lighting setup designed by US director and filmmaker Michael McQuilken. Unassuming when switched off, these tubes of multicoloured light were spaced between the instruments and controlled by the players themselves. They transformed the hall, deep within Beijing’s most famous landmark, into something that more resembled the inner sanctum of a spaceship.
Untuned instruments (drums, rubber bands, cigar box and the like) predominated in the first third or so. Without a pitch or set of pitches to orient themselves around, my ears took their cues from the relationships between higher sounds and lower ones, the shifting intensity of rhythmic drive and the repetition (or not) of Akiho’s tight cells of material. As things progressed, the pitched instruments came to the fore, a harmonic structure emerged and then, seemingly from nowhere, long, fractured strains of melody began to rattle across the stage.
In a pre-concert press conference, the composer told an array of Chinese journalists about the intricacies of the palindromic structure of Seven Pillars, though the piece’s length and unrelenting force meant it was not really evident in performance. Instead, the players quickly created an almost trance-like state that seemed to beat time itself into submission. Four solos – one for each player – and seven movements for all four of them together. Akiho, who is also a percussionist, worked closely with the players as he wrote the piece – and it showed. No doubt each of them has his own weak spots but you would not know it from this almost superhuman display of rhythmic prowess and laser-cut ensemble playing.
Before the show began, Akiho was presented with the Beijing Music Festival’s Young Artist award. In his acceptance speech, he encouraged the audience to enjoy Seven Pillars however they saw fit. ‘You can get up, you can dance, you can scream, you can shout,’ he said. ‘Enjoy it, fasten your seatbelts!’ He also gave us permission to film the performance – many of us didn’t need telling twice. The audience’s keen camerawork may also have had something to do with the fact that the onstage made for top-notch social media content. It wasn’t just me who was mesmerized by the whole thing: Chinese classical audiences are not known for their exuberant applause but this one really let rip at the end.
It bears noting, though, that a fairly steady stream of people walked out throughout the show. Although Akiho had told us to follow our instincts, I am not sure this was quite what he had in mind. A performance of Seven Pillars is an intense experience – perhaps those who left just fancied something a little more laidback. Anyone who didn’t stay for the whole thing missed a real treat, however. Despite the ferocious demands of the previous hour and a half, Sandbox Percussion returned to the stage fresh faced for a dazzling encore that began with Akiho playing a steel pan. It began as an altogether more serene affair, with the composer teasing ribbons of soft metal sound from his drum and ended with all five players as we had come to know them best: riding high on a groove of Akiho’s making.
Tom Stewart