KUNIKO - kuniko plays reich live at Cheltenham - Sunday Times

...That couldn't quite be said of the young Japanese-American percussionist Kuniko, who played a 70-minute sequence at the recently built, crisply finished Parabola Arts Centre.  The essence was her versions of three of the "couterpoint" pieces (for other instruments) by Steve Reich - whose 75th birthday the festival celebrated - but she began with a marimba suite of her own and fitted in Hywel Davies's Purl Ground (2003) for marimba, an exercise in sotto-voce tremolos.  The Reich works all involve mulitple versions of the same performer on tape, duly intermodulated, and often one wonders why a live element is needed at all.  Kuniko left one in no doubt.  Her lissome presence was all-dominating.  She didn't merely play her vibes, glockenspiel and marimba, she danced around them.