Canberra International Music Festival / 8 Pipers for Philip Glass, Sonya Lifschitz, Erwan Keravec ensemble. At Snow Concert Hall, May 3. Reviewed by NICK HORN.

The festival audience was thrilled as Erwan Keravec and his band of pipers from Brittany blasted new life into austere works by Philip Glass, after a beautifully serene performance by Sonya Lifschitz of Glass’ classic Metamorphosis for solo piano.

For 30 minutes we were engrossed in the sound of the grand piano únder Lifschitz’s hands: a chiming chord sequence followed by the repetitive rippling and rocking of ostinatos over a plain but evocative melody, subtly transforming over five movements. Drama accompanies the smallest of changes – a new chord or voicing, a modulation, a major to minor shift, a syncopated rhythm. A note here, a phrase there, falls out of pattern: small flaws like the intentional asymmetries in a Persian carpet.

Lifschitz demonstrated perfectly even control throughout this extended work, as the sound patterns emerged transparently with little rubato or added affect. This deceptively simple music was performed with concentration, delicacy and fluid lyricism.

After the interval – same composer, but what a different sound universe! Keravec and one after another of his colleagues set off striding across the stage, filling the hall with the overwhelming sound of bagpipes blasting out the fast unison passage work of Glass’ 2 Pages over drones. The upper partials of the sound assaulted the ear, but if muted by judicious fingers, this could be the majestic sound of a pipe organ (an original vehicle for these works).

The bagpipes are revealed, as Keravec has commented, as an ideal medium for Glass’ music, wind instruments on which rapidly repeated but slowly shifting patterns can be rendered over unbroken pipe drones without the players coming up for air.

Like an organ, maybe, but the dramatic aural and visual effect of the pipe band is striking. This performance was presented with simple but effective staging and lighting, drawing attention to the structure and elements of each work.

In the next work, Fifths, two pipers (on bagpipe and the higher-pitched biniou) resumed with relentless unbroken scales in parallel fifths (breaking the laws of classical harmony Glass learnt from Nadia Boulanger) in rear centre stage while two others at the front, on either side, sounded out foghorn blasts, signalling to each other like ships in the night.

For the final works, Music in Contrary Motion and Music in Similar Motion, the bagpipers were joined by players of the bombard, oboe-like folk instruments. These added colour and richness, allowing the listener to pick out interjections and call and response patterns within the saturated soundscape.

Additional players joined the group gradually throughout each of these works (how did they know when to come in, amidst such constant repetition?). With the addition of the last biniou in the last piece, all eight members of the ensemble stood before us, creating wave upon wave of sound crashing into the hall, until suddenly there was silence.