Cork-born Alex Petcu-Colan keeps banging on about percussion
ALEX PETCU-COLAN couldn’t really avoid music if he tried. Born in Cork to a family that was already deep in the tradition, he would have found it difficult to take his toddler feet from the path already laid out before him.
However, as soon as he reasonably could, the youngest member of the Petcu household struck out on a side track definitely less travelled. Now aged 28, he is an established and widely-acknowledged percussionist and was recently announced as the recipient of the National Concert Hall’s Rising Star Award for 2015. This award brings with it the rewarding challenge of a special recital at that august venue tonight.
Why percussion? “Well everybody else in the family was playing violin! I was started off with both violin and piano when I was very small, but when I was about 12 — you know what kids are like at that age — I wanted to bang things and play really loud stuff. So I took up percussion. Later on, of course, I began to explore that field of music much more widely and to discover all the amazing things you could do within it.”
And did Petcu père (recently retired head of strings at Cork School of Music) tear his hair out? “Maybe at the state of the house, with my stuff all over the place. I’m living in Dublin now, but still tend to bring a packed van whenever I come home.”
As a leader in his field, Petcu-Colan regularly performs with a range of Irish music ensembles including the RTÉ National Symphony and the RTÉ Concert Orchestras. He won first prize at the Irish Freemasons Young Musician of the Year competition in 2013, recently received a Yamaha Music Foundation of Europe scholarship, and has been chosen as artist in residence at the Cork School of Music.
He also reached the semi-finals of the Tromp International Percussion Competition in 2012. Clearly he has chosen the right field of music in which to work.
“Actually if it’s fun, you don’t see it too much as work, more a way of life. In transition year I went to France, officially to learn the language, but did percussion there too. I saw and heard a lot of stuff that I hadn’t heard before and brought some of that back with me.”
Working as a percussionist, he says, you might be in an orchestra one day doing a school show or musical the next, a theatrical production the following week, then a recital — anything in fact.
“You say yes to a job and then you might have to research it fairly quickly. Nobody’s an expert in everything but you need to have a working knowledge of as many techniques as possible,” he says.
We all associate percussion with drums, but how about timpani, cymbals, triangles, tambourines, glockenspiel, xylophone? Just to test him, I ask the correct way to play a Tibetan singing bowl. Not a hesitation. “Let it rest in the palm of your hand before you strike it with the stick. You get the best results like that,” he says.
He is thrilled to have been selected as the 2015 Rising Star recitalist.
“Aside from the importance and prestige of the award, it also means I will have a stage big enough to perform a really challenging repertoire.”
This evening, he will be joined by his sister Ioana (violin) plus friends Chris Stynes, Maeve O’Hara and Catriona Frost (percussion) for some of the most colourful music ever composed for percussion, including Xenakis’s powerful and high- impact Psappha and Rebonds and a transcription of Debussy’s beautiful and elegant Arabesque No 1.
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