There’s very little to say about this disc save that if you appreciate the talents of an extraordinarily gifted percussionist and fancy hearing her walk on, interpret or improvise for an hour or so, then walk off again – you can’t really go wrong. The musical selections are lightweight, lively and tonally varied, from the Bartokian resonances of Louis Cauberghs’s Halasana (piano and drum kit), through Robert Sierra’s Bongo-O (which, according to Glennie’s own lively notes, uses “several unorthodox striking techniques, such as scratching heads with fingernails”), to Askell Masson’s snare-drum solo Prim, a home-grown, metallic cocktail The Anvil Chorus (David Lang) and – perhaps most pleasing of all – Frederic Rzewski’s To the Earth, which was to have been scored “for chorus, seven orchestras of different ethnic origins and electronics” but ended up being distributed among four flower pots, with a reciter (here Glennie herself) intoning a “pseudo-Homeric hymn To The Earth Mother of All, probably written in the Seventh Century BC”. Glennie intersperses these and other selections with seven improvised Sorbets, utilizing various instruments and ending with a vividly stereophonic “Hi-Hat Playout”.
Sound, production and presentation are all first-rate and if musical values tend largely towards the ephemeral, that is not in any way to decry the brilliance of the playing or the imagination employed in stringing these various pieces together. Treat it as a live concert, then pass it on to your friends.'