Reviews

A selection of reviews by MICHAEL DERVAN

Gerard Gillen (organ)

St Michael’s, Dún Laoghaire

Gerard Gillen’s recital at St Michael’s Church, Dún Laoghaire, on Sunday, was full of anniversary celebrations, major and minor. Bach, of course, was treated as an exception, in no need of any anniversary, and his Prelude and Fugue in B minor, BWV544, opened the concert as an example of what the performer dubbed “the gold standard”.

The major anniversaries fell into pairs. Handel died in 1759, the year in which Purcell was born. Haydn died in 1809, and Mendelssohn was born that same year. The minor figures that Gillen chose to focus on were Adolph Friedrich Hesse (who shared the year of his birth with Mendelssohn), Charles Tournemire (who died in 1939), and Petr Eben (who was born 10 years earlier, and died in 2007).

Gillen’s programming shows a delight in dusting off the cobwebs from neglected works. There’s a good reason why, for instance, you won’t hear much of Handel or Haydn in a solo organ recital. There’s a straightforward shortage of material.

Gillen’s excavations included a Handel Voluntary of dubious provenance, which he coupled with an authentic fugue. And he managed to squeeze Haydn in by making selections from pieces written for a mechanical organ rather than one requiring the intervention of a human performer. The Handel sounded serious, the Haydn anything but – the performances of the four short Haydn pieces were of a cartoonish, music-box character.

Hesse’s Prelude and Fugue in E minor, Op. 37 No. 4, came across as a work of sturdy bluntness, the selection of rarely heard pieces by his coeval, Mendelssohn, showing an imaginative streak that was quite out of Hesse’s reach.

The evening's performances often showed signs of rhythmic friskiness, delightfully so in the Haydn, though sometimes awkwardly so, as in the final Capriceof Tournemire's baroque-flavoured Suite Evocatriceand in the rollicking wit of Eben's Hommage à Henry Purcell.

At other times, in earlier movements of the Tournemire and in Purcell’s Voluntary in G, the effect was of a musing, spur-of-the- moment unpredictability. It was Gerard Gillen who founded the St Michael’s recital series back in 1974. And his regular appearances there still contrive – did I mention his colourful registration? – to surprise in the most unexpected of ways.

Le Concert Spirituel/Niquet

Kilkenny Arts Festival

The French early music ensemble, Le Concert Spirituel, offered a most unusual concert at St Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, on Saturday.

The musical offering, which celebrated the splendour of the music of the cathedrals under Louis XIV, was presented, without interval, in the manner of a religious service.

Not only was most of the music unfamiliar, but even the layout of musical forces on the stage was unusual. A choir of 12 male voices was ranged in a semi-circle behind a small group of lower-voiced string instruments (viola da gamba, cellos and double bass), with the conductor, Hervé Niquet, seated in the centre, and a chamber organ positioned to one side.

The largest work was a Requiem by Pierre Bouteiller (1655-1730), which was framed and intercut with vocal and instrumental works by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704), Pierre Hugard (c.1725, post 1765), Louis Le Prince (who is known only through a single mass, published in 1663), and Henri Frémart (who died sometime after 1646).

This group of composers represented not just musical life in Paris. It included men who also worked in Strasbourg, Meaux, Troyes, Châlons-sur-Marne, Rouen, and possibly Lisieux.

It was an evening of mostly solemn music, performed with a gravity and severity that seemed peculiarly suited to a gray day in a world still struggling to recover from financial meltdown.

The steadiness and the lack of rhythmic animation had a strangely calming effect, slightly hypnotic, slightly numbing, the highly ritualised style of the performances casting a spell that made this recherché repertoire seem at once monotonous and hard to resist. The piece that made the largest impression was the closing Stabat Materby Brossard, whose response to the granting of "glory in paradise" prompted one of the evening's rare moments of real rhythmic vigour.

Kilkenny Arts Festival usefully provided texts and translations in the programme book, but did no one any favours by dimming the house lights, so that following the French-accented Latin became extremely difficult.