Colin Currie Group celebrates The Martland Band

© Frances Marshall

This Friday 17 April, Colin and the Colin Currie Group return to London’s Kings Place to perform an all-Steve Martland programme as part of the venue’s wider tribute to the composer across their season.

The Group will, as usual, be led by Colin, who will perform on marimba in Horses of Instruction and Starry Night, and will also conduct the larger band in the second half of the concert. For Colin, Steve Martland was both a mentor and friend, and performed in the Steve Martland Band in some of his earliest professional engagements as a percussionist.

Colin second from left in the original Steve Martland band.

The band will be hand-picked by Currie for this special performance, and will feature musicians who played in the original Martland Band, or have other connections to the composer and his music. The programme will revive some of his best known band works: Kick, Beat the Retreat and Eternal Delight.

Watch a special feature video with Colin and Kings Place ahead of the concert below:

Colin Currie Group releases landmark new album Steve Reich: The Sextets on Colin Currie Records

Today, Colin and the Colin Currie Group have released their new album: Steve Reich The Sextets, marking the composer’s 90th birthday year and the 20th anniversary of the Colin Currie Group. The album is the first time all of Reich’s works for sextet forces – Sextet, Double Sextet, Dance Patterns and Six Marimbas – have ever been compiled on a single album.

This release is the sixth album on Colin Currie Records, which was launched in 2017 with the release of the Colin Currie Group’s landmark first recording of Steve Reich’s Drumming.

Stream/purchase Steve Reich The Sextets.

This new album was made possible by a successful Kickstarter campaign, enthusiastically and kindly backed by supporters of the group and Steve Reich. It was then recorded at London’s Kings Place in August 2025.

Colin Currie performs at Sheffield's Music In the Round

© Frances Marshall

This weekend, Colin performs at Upper Chapel Sheffield, as part of the Percussion, Pattern & Primes weekend by Music In The Round.

Colin will open the concert with five solo works consisting of Kevin Volans’s Asanga, David Horne’s Pulse, Andy Akiho’s Spiel, Bryce Dessner’s Tromp Miniature, and Rolf Wallin’s Realismos Mágicos. He will then be joined by string quartet Ensemble 360 for Andy Akiho’s ‎Aluminous, Robert Honstein’s Continuous interior for vibraphone & strings, and the UK premiere of Sam Adams’s Sundial.

Sam Adams - son of American composer John Adams - shares that Sundial “explores ideas of resonance and brightness.” and that “In many passages, the strings elongate the percussion sounds and vice versa, so much so that the instruments on stage might sound like one polyphonic organism arranged not in a hierarchy but in a symbiotic web in which the roles of the instruments are balanced and consistently in flux.”

Read more about the work here.

Colin Currie performs consecutive concerts with the Belgian National Orchestra

© Frances Marshall

This week, Colin joins the Belgian National Orchestra for two consecutive concerts across Belgium as part of BOZAR’s spotlight on composer Julia Wolfe, and the Beats & Pieces festival. Concerts take place on 15 January at Bozar, Centre for Fine Arts, and 16 January at the Philharmonic Hall of Liege.

“In ‘Body Language’, I give Colin an entirely new challenge: to deploy his virtuosity in a completely different way.”

— Julia Wolfe

Colin will first take the stage to perform Julia Wolfe’s Body Language - a work composed for Colin, in which he gave the world premiere in 2012 alongside the BBC Concert Orchestra. Julia describes her work as “urban folk music for the orchestra”, and is inspired by the bustling sounds of New York City street music. Read Julia’s interview with BNO ahead of the concert.

Colin will then assume the role of soloist/director in Louis Andriessen Tapdance Concerto - another work which was written for Colin, and premiered by him in 2014.

Listen to the livestream of the concert on 15 January at 8pm CET.

Behind the scenes recording Steve Reich

© Andy Doe

Back in August this year, Colin and the Colin Currie Group ventured to Kings Place, London, to record all of Steve Reich's Sextets: Sextet, Double Sextet, Six Marimbas and Dance Patterns, following a successful kickstarter campaign.

The recording marks the first time Reich’s sextet works have been brought together on a single album, released to celebrate the composer’s 90th birthday in 2026, and coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the Colin Currie Group.

““The Colin Currie Group continues to give outstanding
performances and make great recordings of more
and more of my music. Colin himself not only performs
but frequently conducts my larger scale works.
This recording of ‘The Sextets’ presents four pieces
that are all for different combinations of instruments that
create different kinds of music – compare Six Marimbas
to Double Sextet for instance. What is common here
is an absolutely top level of performance.””

— Steve Reich, September 2025

Steve Reich: The Sextets releases 10 April 2026 on Colin Currie Records.

Colin Currie makes conducting debut with the BBC Philharmonic

© Frances Marshall

On Saturday 29 November, Colin will make his conducting debut with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert at The Bridgewater Hall in Manchester.

Opening the concert, Colin will lead the orchestra in Steve Reich’s large-scale Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards, before presenting John Adams’ adrenaline-fuelled new work Frenzy: a short symphony.

Colin will then conduct Gabriella Smith’s unique orchestral work f(x)=sin²x-1/x, before returning to Reich for the composer’s bold and expansive centrepiece The Four Sections.

Looking ahead, Colin will conduct Reich’s Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards and The Four Sections again in October 2026, as well as Reich’s Three Movements for Orchestra, this time with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The concert will be part of the composer’s 90th birthday celebrations, and joined by The National’s guitarist Bryce Dessner. Tickets on sale now.

Colin Currie and The King's Singers perform at Kings Place

© Frances Marshall

Following his concerts with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra this week, Colin reunites with The King’s Singers for a concert at Kings Place, London, in a continuation of their project that debuted at the Edinburgh International Festival in August.

The programme will feature the London premiere of Sir James MacMillan’s A Bunch o’ Craws, alongside arrangements of Missy Mazzoli's A Year of Our Burning and Roderick Williams' Death be not proud, as well as Steve Martland's Street Songs, which was written for The King's Singers.

“A remarkable collaboration between Scotland’s international percussion superstar and the superb a cappella sextet… the group’s golden-toned, immaculately-pitched ensemble sound remains peerless.”

— The Herald ★★★★★

Watch Colin discuss his collaboration with The King’s Singers ahead of their performance at the Edinburgh International Festival earlier this year:

Colin Currie returns to play/direct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra

© Frances Marshall

This week, Colin returns to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra - this time to play/direct the ensemble across two concerts at Edinburgh’s The Queen's Hall, and at Glasgow’s City Hall.

The programme will open with Joe Duddell’s Snowblind, a work close to Colin that was written specifically for him, receiving it’s world premiere over 20 years ago in Inverness in 2002.

Read more about how Colin utilises the keyboard percussion instruments in a feature with SCO.

Colin will then perform the UK premiere of Helen Grime’s River, a two-movement work that contrasts “flow and energy” with “moments of glassy stasis“ inspired the characteristics of a river. No stranger to Grime’s works, Colin has previously performed the world premiere of Grime’s Percussion Concerto alongside the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2019.

Read more about Helen Grime’s River.

The concert will then culminate in performances of two minimalist masterpieces: Steve Reich’s Runner and Double Sextet, directed by Colin.

Earlier this year, Colin and the Colin Currie Group launched a crowdfunding campaign to record Reich’s complete Sextet works, which are planned to be released to mark the composer’s 90th birthday celebrations in 2026.

Watch the trailer for Colin’s SCO concerts below: