Claire Edwardes
Percussion 
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CLAIRE EDWARDES
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DUO VERTIGO
Percussionists Claire
Edwardes (Australia) and Niels Meliefste (The Netherlands) met in 2000 at the
Tromp Percussion Competition in Eindhoven, The Netherlands – there they
were awarded first and second place and since then they have been perfecting
the art of playing percussion together. In April 2005, as Duo Vertigo, they were
awarded third prize in the prestigious Gaudeamus International Interpreters
Competition.
REVIEW
Program - This
is Percussion? Two pieces stood out for me in this concert, Matthew Shlomowitz’s Slow Hand Clap and John Cage’s Three˛. Claire Edwardes and Niels Meliefste approached Cage’s piece with great intelligence and imagination. It was well spaced with a wind chime hanging over the audience on the internal balcony of the Warehouse, made to chime with a nylon thread; a toy crocodile moving through the middle of the audience, again pulled with a thread. The piece was playful and most importantly utterly beautiful in it’s absolute insistence on sincerity and truthfulness. Shlomowitz’s piece keeps skillfully away from the obvious. Dealing with stability / instability and force / gentleness it moves through a number of stable rhythmic patterns with wonderful moments of falling apart and reassembling itself. Pans, ceramic pots and plastic containers were used and at first played with hard sticks. Later they were played with fingertips and this illustrated the interesting sounds that all objects might inherently possess. Roderick de Man’s A Case History uses a travel case as percussion instrument, yet the rhythms used here are all very familiar ones from rock to African drumming which make the piece less experimental than at first one might hope. John Lely’s Desk Bells was a nice idea and looked very pretty with all those coloured desk bells. He has the two percussionist sit opposite each other with eight bells each. They move up the scale alternately and then rearrange two bells and start again to create a different pitch pattern. As the title suggests, Tim Parkinson’s two cardboard boxes explored the sound possibilities of cardboard boxes, and they do have a rather pleasing warm sound. The two performers seemed to drift nicely between independent playing and then practically Morse coding at each other.
Finally Steve Reich’s classic
Clapping Music
was performed very well by Edwardes and Meliefste. In fact the whole concert was
beautifully performed and programmed by Duo Vertigo.
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