PROMS / A woman on the move: Paul Fisher meets Evelyn Glennie, the world's only full-time female solo percussionist

IT'S AMAZING when any musician achieves a solo career. But it's more amazing still when the musician in question is a young woman who has gatecrashed an otherwise male preserve marked 'Percussion' to become the 'first full- time percussion soloist in the world'. Evelyn Glennie's Aberdeen accent turns the final R of 'world' into a roll on a granite drum and I believe her when she says she's stubborn.

Hearing Glennie's work, her claim that many percussionists can play as well as her is less believable. 'Being a soloist doesn't mean you're better than anybody else,' she says. 'It's the confidence of having something to say with the music.' She has loads to say, most importantly her insistence that solo percussionists belong on concert platforms. But for her skill and ability to pull crowds, there would be several hours of music which would never have been written. In a short career she's attracted works from Dominic Muldowney, John McLeod and Richard Rodney Bennett. The latest, James MacMillan's Veni, Veni, Emmanuel, gets its premiere at the Proms on Monday. It will be her second Albert Hall visit: she gave the Proms' first solo percussion recital in 1989.

What adds to the amazement is that Glennie has been deaf since her early teens. Her publicists said she was fed up with talking about deafness and sent me a copy of her autobiography, Good Vibrations. It's a cliff-hanger and the reader waits until Chapter 8 before Glennie writes of her condition. 'I can tell the quality of a note by what I feel. I can sense musical sound through my feet and lower body, and also through my hands . . . Music isn't just a question of sound . . . there must first of all be the seed that comes from the heart . . . Playing an instrument is mechanical . . . you don't need ears.'

That's all anybody need know. Apart from the eye contact demanded by lip-reading, the deafness is hidden. She doesn't mention it and neither does she miss a word or a nuance. She has a laugh to draw a ship on to rocks and grabs the chance to talk up the premiere of Veni, Veni, Emmanuel. 'It's not,' she says, 'your normal concerto where the soloist shows off.'

MacMillan's score puts her centre stage, dashing among tubular bells, a five-octave marimba, a vibraphone, congas, timbales, snare drums, tom-toms, a bass drum, gongs, tam-tams, cymbals, cowbells and woodblocks. Her gongs start the 25-minute piece and this is how it ends: 'I'll walk down the middle of the orchestra, climb my little steps and play the tubular bells.'

By then the whole orchestra will he playing metal maracas and Japanese temple bells. Glennie fetched one from a drift of instruments in her fireplace. 'Some musicians will hit them like this and others will do a wine-glass thing. We'll see how it works. It will be a great experience.' Between gongs and bells she promises a 'spiky pattern on the vibraphone and an aggressive, percussive climax. Only the marimba is given a mellow sound in a cadenza with the orchestra playing a chant.'

The Glennie/MacMillan collaboration is being cracked up as a Scottish dream ticket. 'I haven't seen it like that,' she says. 'To be honest, I can't see anything Scottish in this piece. But I'm only experiencing James's ideas at a surface level and, like any new music, it will take several performances before I understand what the composer is after.' She makes no claim to have contributed anything beyond such 'logistics' as persuading MacMillan that 'putting a barrel in water is impractical'.

Where MacMillan plays the home-loving Scot and is unfashionably certain about the Catholicism behind his music, Glennie is an easy-going lapsed Presbyterian who has lived in London for 10 years. There's a fine abandon about her as she stands, stretches and hits the air before my nose to show her moves on the big bass bells. She's tiny and fierce and quick and I feel like a bull elephant with my questions. 'Yes,' she says, 'I'll wear trousers. I need my legs apart and not to worry about getting caught up in stands or zips splitting. I need to move.'

A need to move could be her motto and is evident in her attitude to possessions. Outside her west London terraced house is a new van to carry pounds 30,000 worth of instruments: while the van has her name painted on it in big purple letters, the house hasn't had a lick of paint in years. She has recently sold up and bought a house-cum-studio in Cambridge. The idea is that she'll move on to experimenting with electronics.

'You can't ignore these things. I'm a world percussionist and try to pick up as many instruments as I can, digest the music and use it in my own way. I can't be the player I want if I ignore African or Japanese or Aboriginal or Chinese music.' On a recent South Bank Show she was filmed taking part in the Rio carnival, pale-faced beneath a plumed head-dress.

She's studied in Japan and Africa and the day before we met she'd returned from a performance at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Today she's joining the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for the first full rehearsal of Veni, Veni, Emmanuel. 'I know, I know. It's close.' Most of the preparation is done alone with weeks at home studying the score and three days in a hired rehearsal room.

Toward the end of the interview I asked how it was she'd broken so many barriers. It earned a quizzical look. 'I mean being a solo woman percussionist, and a deaf musician.' We'd already covered the first points, so her eyes hardened for a moment. Then she laughed. 'What can I say? I don't know . . . There are plenty of female percussionists but none with a timpanist's chair. They may not be good enough. I don't know.'

What she knows with certainty is that, for her, 'everything is based around performance' and she's equally adamant it was absurd that she 'never got one single solo lesson' at the Royal Academy. It's always satisfying to prove your school wrong and now the core of her ambition is to expand the solo repertoire so her teachers will be wrong for all time. 'There are so many ideas I'd love to try and I can't let that go while I'm at an age where I feel I can do things.' She's 27. 'Time catches up and you soon find . . . your hands aren't functioning or you've lost a leg.' I said she'd probably hop and there was more laughter to mask, I suppose, her keen sense of life's urgency and the possibilities of physical loss.

She returned to the subject of her stubborness, insisting that she does listen to advice. 'I do, but eventually only you know your abilities. Other people don't really know who you are deep inside.' Earlier she'd talked of the paradox of the music business. On the one hand she's doing what she loves, 'which is playing music to audiences'. Yet the business inevitably pitches her in with agents, managements and record companies 'for whom you've got to put on some kind of face (and) cannot be yourself. You're a commodity they buy and sell.' What they're buying - what we're buying - is that rare commodity of visceral skill which blossoms under a spotlight and I reminded her she'd talked earlier of letting audiences see her as a person. 'Yes,' she replied. 'Sometimes I feel I can project something very strong.'

So far critics, too, have stood back in amazement, only balking at her eclecticism. 'This will bring it showering down on me,' she says, 'but I haven't yet received a review where they've criticised the playing. I can't believe it's because I'm so magnificent. I think it's their lack of knowledge about percussion.'

Evelyn Glennie plays MacMillan's 'Veni, Veni, Emmanuel' at the Proms on Monday (see listings, below, for ticket offer) and at the Edinburgh Festival on 5 September.

(Photograph omitted)