Celebrating Grainger, Kings Place

Too many column inches have been devoted to Percy Grainger’s sado-masochistic sexplay and celebration of blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon supremacy, but it’s his music I love. And have done ever since they celestially sounded the wineglasses for Tribute to Foster, his fantasia on "Camptown Races", at the 1982 Aldeburgh Festival (Britten had been an adoring fan). None of our main orchestras has yet taken up a similar gauntlet on the 50^th anniversary of the Australian-born one-off’s death. So hurrah, in principle, for the smaller-scale enterprise of Kings Place’s four-day festival devised by pianist and Grainger specialist Penelope Thwaites.

Yesterday evening could not have been its finest couple of hours. Its curtain-raiser, at least, was as good as any: a selection of the piano rolls Grainger "recorded" and assembled of his own and his musical friends’ miniatures, expertly pedalled and articulated on that marvellous reproducing instrument the pianola by Michael Broadway. No, he didn't give us Country Gardens in any of its multiple guises; that millstone round Grainger's neck, as heavy as the C sharp minor Prelude was to Rachmaninov or Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 to Elgar, would surface later in the evening in a quirkier form. But the nearly-as-popular specimen furnished in two shapes by Broadway, Shepherd's Hey, showed us why this is hardly the cowpat-fertilised school of Anglophone music. The tendrils Grainger stretches out around the jolly tune are more Miracle-Gro (and there are a few triffids and venus flytraps in his vast armoury, too).

The thousand-finger licence Grainger brought to his more elaborate mechanical-piano version, anticipating Antheil and Stravinsky, had the hothoused audience rolling in the aisles (no mean achievement for the sea of bird's-nest beards and low testosterone levels which keep these kind of events going). The personality of the player came through for his rollicking performance (as if live, of course, for all the caprices of the pianola) of the "Cakewalk Smasher" In Dahomey, perhaps the best specimen of Grainger in adolescent, jubilant mood. And it was good to hear a few oddities by the contemporaries who wrote for him, Cyril Scott and Joseph Holbrooke, safe-sounding in name alone (the Quilter dances really were cowpat territory, but you can't have everything).

Watch a pianola performance (not as artistic as Michael Broadway's) of Grainger's more complicated Shepherd's Hey arrangement

What I'd really come to hear, though, was one of Grainger's strangest rituals, The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart, in the evening's second event. Serving briefly as a bandsman in the American army during World War One, Grainger wrote it because his own heart ached for the young men laying down their lives for the decaying old powers. Captain Mike Smith, expressing his bewilderment just before he conducted military forces including the Royal Artillery Band, clearly didn't get quite why this weird, long piece should be inspired by soldiers at bayonet practice. The best that can be said for the brass and wind, sounding good collectively at least in Kings Place's Hall One with the percussion ranged around the gallery above, is that they got through the murk and the brief flashes of glory (though a synthesised organ didn't exactly launch the atmosphere of old-guard oppression in style).

But I know it can work better than this, and I wonder why Thwaites hadn't turned to one of the excellent wind bands from the music colleges. I got to know The Power and other wonders through the superlative Chandos recording by the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra conducted by Timothy Reynish (currently to be found on a bargain-price 19-CD anniversary box, pictured right). Fluent youth would have brought more exuberance to the lighter pieces; only the sorry saxophones added an extra, if unintentional, degree of humorous wailing to the naughty Country Gardens arrangement, and even the Marches had no real brio.

The real casualty, though, was the intended mystery of the Hill Song No 2, token of Grainger's love for Delius: no hint of phrasing or overall shape here from the first of the evening's three conductors, Major Neil Morgan. And was this "Friday Night is Music Night" when we were all cajoled into shouting "good evening" back and sympathising over the players' busy day? You'd have thought it would be a relief to have the spoken baton, as it were, handed over to Keith Michell, but that was a bit of a shock too: I suppose I still expected a robust Henry VIII when what we got was a good impersonation of a forgetful old major. He should have been given a seat onstage and not been left to wander on and off between numbers.

So it was not the most professional of occasions. Can I be forgiven for hoofing it home at the interval and listening to the exquisite Lincolnshire Posy and other miniatures on my Chandos and Mercury CDs? After all, this piece is really about celebrating Grainger in the round just before the anniversary day, and I thought I could do it, and reflect on his diverse genius, better that way. Not that I wouldn't come back tonight for a different crew, did I not have a Mahler Das Lied von der Erde to go to. And I live in hope that more shapely Grainger events featuring the exquisite choral settings will follow both in the Australasian-themed City of London Festival - details to be announced next month on the COLF website - and at the (still under wraps) Proms. I can't think of a better way to involve whole communities than the freer-range pieces of John Cage's early-20th-century predecessor.

• Further details of remaining events in the Celebrating Grainger festival on the Kings Place website
• One more concert on the anniversary day, Sunday, 20 February, at St John's Smith Square
• Grainger Anniversary Day Seminar at the British Library, Sunday, 20 February

Catch a glimpse of Grainger's elastic pianism as he plays his arrangement of the Irish 'march-jig' Maguire's Kick