Pedro Carneiro & Friends/Colin Currie, Purcell Room, London

Now more than 30 years old, Steve Reich's early minimalist masterpiece, Drumming, is rarely heard in live performance, especially in its entirety, and few ensembles besides the composer's own have taken up its considerable challenges. It was, therefore, particularly rewarding to hear this account, as part of the South Bank Centre's valuable and varied "rhythmsticks" festival, by an ad hoc group assembled by the brilliant young percussionist, Pedro Carneiro, performed to an almost capacity house.

Lasting an hour and seven minutes, their performance was some 10 minutes longer than that of Steve Reich and Musicians on their 1987 recording, and seemed to announce its intention to be even bigger when these drummers lingered long over the initial unfolding of the work's basic material.

In the performance as a whole, there was a lot of good, youthful energy and notably increasing confidence, so that Part 3 (the one with the raucous glockenspiels, human whistler and piccolo) and the concluding Part 4 (which gloriously brings everyone – drummers, marimbists, glock players, two female singers and piccolo – together) were the most successful. It was good to hear the work unamplified, except for the pair of singers, and enhanced by atmospherically low lighting.

There were, it has to be said, a lot of flaws in this performance. The extremely tricky phasing procedures of Parts 1 and 2 – for drums and for marimbas with singers, respectively – were somewhat bungled. Part 1 was leaden and awkward, the playing of its resulting patterns often inaudible, at least from my seat. The tempo of Part 2 sagged dangerously in the middle before being rescued; the bottom line of this marimba texture was ruined by inaccurate, erratic playing. The singers looked, and sounded, stiff.

In an ideal world, these brave musicians would be paid to spend a month rehearsing Drumming in the sort of workshop conditions in which the composition itself was created, and then take it on a national tour. Anyone listening over at the Arts Council's Contemporary Music Network?

The festival also included a solo percussion recital by Colin Currie. The quality of the music in this valiant one-man show (with intermittent electronic assistance) was mixed. "Fire Over Water", part of Per Norgard's "feature-length" work, I Ching, and Reich's Nagoya Marimbas (also heard in Carneiro's concert) were the best things on offer.

Currie ably assaulted a whole battery of instruments and spoke wittily about each piece. If not all the performances demonstrated quite all his usual flair, the exorbitant demands of his programme were probably the cause.