Galway Group Too Mild to Be Moving

Onstage Thursday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts: a huge array of percussion instruments, two fishbowls, 15 microphones and batteries of speakers at each side of the stage.

But not to worry--veteran flutist James Galway, appearing with the young Danish percussionists Uffe Savery and Morten Friis, who perform under the name of the Safri Duo, would offer the most mild, middle-of-the-road program imaginable.

Musical interest peaked in only two technologically low-keyed places. The first, which the ever-genial Galway introduced from the stage, was a set of three traditional Irish hornpipes that might have been played among the immigrants in steerage aboard a ship such as the Titanic, which was built in Ireland, Galway’s native country.

“It was perfect when it left,” he quipped.

With Galway playing penny whistle, Savery playing spoons and Friis playing a little drum, the stage came alive with spirited, uplifting tootling and rhythms in “The Boys of Blue Hill,” “Harvest Home” and “Belfast Hornpipe.”

The other occurred in Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music.” The two percussionists first taught the basic pattern to the audience--a sequence of eight beats in a 12-beat bar: one-two-three, rest, one-two, rest, one, rest, one-two, rest.

Savery and Friis then divided the audience in two parts and everyone clapped the music in canon, half a beat apart. Then the two played it as written, considerably faster with Savery beginning steadily to “hiccup,” as he put it, or jump a beat until the out-of-sync clapping perfectly lined up again.

So when the two rejoined Galway for Mike Mower’s Caribbean-influenced dance suite, “Three Journeys for Three,” you almost wanted to cry for how such talents were squandered in such lounge-act music.

But that was par for a course that included the New Age washes of Niels Eje’s “Fairies and Tales,” the lightweight exoticism of Jacob ter Veldhuis’ “Jungle Heart” and the meandering episodes of Fuzzy’s (that’s the sole name he goes by) “Joggiiiinng!”

Yes, Galway played fast (Allegro from Bach’s Sonata in C) and sweet (Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante defunte”), but neither work, nor even the two encores--”Danny Boy” and the Badinerie from Bach’s Suite No. 2--showed him as a particularly expressive player.