Carlo Curley, organ

Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin

Attending a recital by the inimitable Carlo Curley is rather like finding yourself in some novel where the writer has created an alternative present by deleting some momentous event from the past. Put simply, this exceptional American organist carries on as if the early music revival had never happened. Spreading chords, playing Bach with a legato that verges on portamento, and placing the music in temporary suspended animation while the stops are changed – such things have long been regarded as pernicious habits. Yet Curley makes virtues of them all. In a career now spanning more than 30 years, little has changed in Curley’s gung-ho virtuosity or his gallimaufry of a repertoire.

Saturday evening’s performance at Christ Church Cathedral was positively a roll-call of Curley favourites, including his own arrangements of the Sinfonia to Bach’s

Cantata No 29

and the

Turkish March

from Beethoven’s

Ruins of Athens

. In these and other transcriptions, Curley’s interest lay exclusively in the raw music’s potential for technicolour realisation on the organ, often as if the piece in question had never enjoyed a prior existence.

Indeed, the sprightly

Rondo in G

which Curley persists in attributing to John Bull (1562-1628) is not known to have existed at all before it was “arranged” by the American organist Richard Ellsasser (1926-1972).

Though Bach’s

O Mensch bewein

and Mozart’s

Fantasy in F minor

gestured towards more purist taste, these proved the evening’s least engaging items.

Predictably enough, the concluding

Toccata on an American Theme

by Stefan Lindblad resoundingly confirmed that, for Carlo Curley, brash is best.