© Frances Marshall
On 19 June, Colin will return to the Aldeburgh Festival alongside the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Kevin John Edusei to perform the World Premiere of Tansy Davies’ Earthworks for percussion and orchestra. The performance will also mark Colin’s 40th Concerto Premiere of his career.
The concert will be broadcast live by BBC Radio 3 from 7.30pm BST, and will be available afterwards on BBC Sounds.
Commissioned by Britten Pears Arts, Residentie Orkest The Hague, and with the support of an anonymous donor, Earthworks is a geologically-inspired percussion concerto composed for Colin. It takes inspiration from vast geoglyphs like the Uffington White Horse and the Acre structures of the Amazon rainforest, revealed by deforestation.
It recalls an earlier work – the ritualistic, rhythmic Dark Ground for solo percussion, which Colin recorded on Colin Currie Records in February 2025. Currie calls Dark Ground “stridently disquieting …it seems it could be a pop-style drum-kit that is to hand for the music, but conflicting sounds from another kind of place are never far away”.
Read more about the world premiere here.
In 2023, Colin presented the 2023 Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Works Collection to Davies, remarking on her “uncanny ability to reconcile the edgier elements of pop and funk into vastly ambitious and immensely satisfying structures of truly classical sensibilities.”