Marimba-rama

Matthew Beck rolls out a resonant rack of ribs

Matthew Beck’s work routine usually consists of long stretches of tense, vigilant waiting, punctuated by sudden, dangerously exposed bursts of activity.

He’s not a firefighter. It’s more like the opposite. Whenever Beck picks up a stick, mallet, dinger or banger, it means he’s about to pour gasoline on the flame.

This Friday, the principal percussionist of the Lansing Symphony Orchestra will show another side of his inflammable art as the featured soloist in a melodic, mellifluous marimba concerto by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts.

The concert also features Jean Sibelius’ wistful “Valse Triste” and Beethoven’s rollicking, dance-driven Seventh Symphony.

Each season, music director Timothy Muffitt features one of the orchestra’s principal players as soloist. Last fall, he asked Beck to move to the front of the stage.

“Since he came on board with us, Matt has transformed our percussion section with his artistry, attention to detail, knowledge and leadership,” Muffitt said. “The orchestral percussion illuminates the music, and that takes a very special artist leading the section. Matt has provided that for us, and then some.”

Beck said he was “honored” to be the last LSO musician to be featured this way in Muffitt’s 20-year run as maestro.

There’s been a surge of percussion concertos in the 21st century, and most of them call for all the (figurative) bells and whistles. Muffitt hasn’t shied away from presenting show-stopping percussion concertos by contemporary composers like Jennifer Higdon and Paul Dooley, but Beck wanted to make a different kind of statement.

The Puts concerto gives him a chance to roll out his resonant, ringing, five-octave Adams marimba and take it for a nice, long ride.

“It gives me a lot more opportunity to show off the expressive character of the instrument,” Beck said.

The cadenza — the solo stretch of rocking out that comes just before the end of a concerto — will really take Beck off the leash.

“That will be a chance to really show off what the instrument is capable of, in terms of dynamics and expression,” he said.

Puts wrote the concerto early in his career, inspired by Mozart’s crystalline piano concertos. It’s a spellbinder, not a banger. Muffitt said the concerto flips the usual roles of percussionist and orchestra.

“This time, the orchestra illuminates the qualities of the percussion instrument, instead of the other way around,” Muffitt said. “The listener can feel the orchestra moving into the color world of the marimba.”

The way Muffitt reads the score, Puts was “very much inspired by the deep, rich color palette of the marimba and its characteristic tremolo used to create a sustained tone.”

“He frames the expressive possibilities of the instrument so beautifully,” Muffitt said. “It is an immensely attractive work from the very beginning to the end.”

“It’s not a stereotypical percussion piece,” Beck said. “It’s comparable to any other instrument that would play a concerto. Like Mozart, it’s very melodic, with simple melodies the audience will walk away remembering.”

Beck became interested in percussion at around 11 years old, when his mother, then in her 40s, decided to take lessons from a heavy-metal drummer.

“I sat in on a couple of lessons and started to pick up on it real quick,” Beck said. “I would practice when she wasn’t around. I got better than her, and she got upset and quit. The drum set was just sitting there. She said, ‘You’d better stick with it now.’”

He stuck with it, all right, earning degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music and DePaul University and studying with top musicians from the Cleveland Orchestra and Chicago Symphony.

In addition to his Lansing Symphony gig, Beck is principal percussionist with the West Michigan Symphony and plays as a guest percussionist with orchestras throughout the Midwest.

Beck has a fabulous menagerie of some 50 percussion instruments at his rural Michigan spread. To help make ends meet, he runs a “chop shop” out of his barn, renting, refurbishing and selling musical instruments from school programs and other sellers.

Among his more unusual pieces are bass chimes, 7-foot-long resonating tubes he has rented more than 30 times to performing arts organizations.

A percussionist has to take all kinds of big and small jobs, but Beck said his Lansing gig has been pure pleasure, with or without the chance to step out as a soloist.

“Tim is all about the music,” he said. “With a lot of conductors, it’s all about themselves. They have egos, and they want to make big gestures for board members and that sort of thing. With Tim, the music comes first.”