WOMAD

Evelyn Glennie

From United Kingdom

Evelyn Glennie was born in 1965 near Aberdeen in Scotland. At the age of twelve, she became interested in the snare drum. It was around this same time that her hearing began to deteriorate as the result of a neurological disorder. A few years later, Glennie was eighty percent deaf; however, her Scottish stubbornness would not let her give up. She learned to feel the vibrations of the notes, and to distinguish between them with the help of different areas of sensitivity throughout her body. Over the following years Glennie played with many of the great orchestras of the world, appeared several times as a solo performer at the renowned BBC Prom concerts and recorded a dozen CDs. She has worked with Brazilian samba groups, Japanese kodo drummers, Indonesian gamelan orchestras and with the Icelandic rock singer, Björk. Glennie has regularly commissioned contemporary pieces for percussion, thereby constantly expanding her repertoire. Now in her late thirties, she is in a new phase of creativity. She no longer has to prove anything to anybody. She listens now to what is within herself and prefers improvising through good feeling to a perfected technical style. She is an amazing performer with an instinctive understanding of what makes for a brilliant performance.