Okay, the competition repertoire rabbit hole continues just in time for PASIC. This time, I spent all my free time at night on tour scavenging through the percussion programs from ARD 2026. My spreadsheet habit remains well fed, while my sleep schedule suffers.
After TROMP, GPIMC, and Marimba Festiva, ARD gives us something a little different. We still get plenty of familiar marimba repertoire, but now there are snare drums, timpani, theatrical pieces, chamber music, and a concerto as well.
The repertoire sheet contains 27 works across 133 program listings. I matched the official programs to the rounds each competitor reached, so you won’t find someone’s planned final-round piece counted if they were eliminated earlier.
ARD also gives players a fairly specific repertoire list to choose from, alongside required works. Keep that in mind when looking at the numbers, some of the pieces are skewed towards 2-4 setlist pieces only.
The first round brought us four marimba works to choose from: Moi, jeu…by Bruno Mantovani, Entlehnungen by Michael Jarrell, Merlin by Andrew Thomas andVelocities by Joseph Schwantner.
No huge surprises here! Moi, jeu… came out slightly ahead, with Entlehnungen and Merlin close behind. What interested me was how evenly the selections were distributed. There wasn’t one piece that completely took over. Still, with only four marimba works across 23 players, the jury had plenty of opportunities to hear different interpretations of the same pieces.
The marimba solo was only part of the first round. Everyone also had Rebonds B by Xenakis on their program, plus a snare drum selection. Másson’s Prim led that group with twelve listings, followed by Gerassimez’s Asventuras with eight and Cangelosi’s Meditation No. 2 with three.
A fairly full program of playing before anyone even gets near the vibraphone repertoire.
In the second round, 12 players remained, and the vibraphone choices were much more concentrated. Le livre des claviers IV by Philippe Manoury, Omar by Franco Donatoni, and Interzones by Bruce Hamilton.
Manoury and Donatoni accounted for 11 of the 12 selections. Leon Lorenz brought the only Interzones.
The second round also required Pit Dahm’s timpani solo Exorzismus and Johannes Xaver Schachtner’s commissioned work Siebenundzwanzig.
The theatrical selections gave us a broader mix. Globokar’s Corporel and Sarhan’s Homework appeared three times each. Compagnie Kahlua’s Ceci n’est pas une balle and the Eötvös selection listed by ARD as Memoriam Frank Zappa: new Psalm 151 appeared twice each, while Aperghis’s Graffitis and Le corps à corps appeared once each. This is where the breadth of ARD really starts to stand out to me.
By the semifinal, six players remained. Three selected Psappha, while Bone Alphabet, Interieur I, and Thirteen Drums each appeared once.
All six also had the competition arrangement of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, with the candidate playing the marimba 1 part. I’m excited and hopeful that this work will be published soon! It was a great adaptation of the original work, making it a little bit more accessible for percussionists to perform without needing two pianists.
The final came down to Gabriel Michaud and Yuan Xia. Both with the set work by Friedrich Cerha’s Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra, alongside a short solo selection. Michaud chose the Sarabande from Bach’s Suite in E minor, BWV 996, while Xia chose the Allemande from Rameau’s Suite in A from Nouvelles suites de pièces de clavecin.
I like the contrast those short adaptations bring to the final programs. Alongside a major percussion concerto, a few minutes of Bach or Rameau offer another way to hear a player’s phrasing and musical personality. Michaud’s Bach is worth hunting down in the competition livestream just to hear his beautiful phrasing.
Now for the data: below, you will find the repertoire sheet organized by instrument and category.
