{TABLE} Sonata No 1 in D minor .... Guilmant Movement for Organ ........ Eric Sweeney Tu es Petra ............... Mulet Pastorale in C ............ Lefebure - Wely Prelude et danse fugee .... Litaize {/TABLE} "THE French Virtuoso Organ" was the title of Antoinette Baker's recital at the National Concert Hall last Friday lunchtime. She played music by some of the less famous figures in that long line of French organist composers which includes Widor, Franck and Vierne, and which produced distinctive music for the equally distinctive organs built by Aristide Cavaille Coll and his successors. The programme included one work by a founding father of the line, Lefebure Wely, and one by Litaize, who played in Dublin shortly before his death in 1991, and was possibly the last direct link with that distinguished tradition.
Baker's ample phrasing, flexibility and rhythmic energy were well suited to this music. Her occasional overemphasis of the movement was not. The timing of the several distinct phrases which end the Pastorale movement of Guilmant's Sonata No. 1 in D Minor, for example, did not lead towards the end, but produced several successive endings.
This recital was nevertheless an engaging one, in which natural musicianship communicated freely, via a technique which was fluent rather than brilliant. Eric Sweeney's Movement for Organ, the only non French piece on the programme, was vividly played. Anybody with even a touch of Francophilia would have loved Mulet's Tu es Petra and Litaize's Prelude et danse fugee, as Baker locked on to the composers' relish of virtuosity lightly worn, and their enjoyment of the instrument.
