Desmond Hunter (organ)

St Michael’s Church, Dún Laoghaire

Byrd – Fantasia in D minor; The Carman’s Whistle. Purcell – Voluntary for double organ. Mendelssohn – Sonata in A Op 65 No 3. Samuel Wesley – Full Voluntary. Thorogood – Three Short Pieces. Bach – Prelude and Fugue in C BWV547.

Most of the organists who perform in the annual series in St Michael’s Church, Dún Laoghaire, are church organists. Desmond Hunter, who gave the penultimate recital in this year’s series on Sunday, comes from a scholarly background.

He is emeritus professor of music at the University of Ulster. His specialisation is the performance of 17th-century keyboard music, with a particular focus on English music. And he performs on the harpsichord as well as the organ.

The three early English pieces with which he opened Sunday's programme created a peculiar sort of sandwich. The outer layers – Byrd's Fantasia in D minor and Purcell's Voluntary for Double Organ – were more studied than spontaneous, with effects of rubato that sounded unsettled, even arbitrary. In between them, Byrd's The Carman's Whistlehad a spirit-lifting freedom and lightness. His approach to Mendelssohn's Sonata in A, the most popular of the composer's six organ sonatas, was full and warm, and Hunter perked up Samuel Wesley's Full Voluntarywith some clipped dotted rhythms.

The Three Short Piecesby the little-known Michael Thorogood (1932-2005) were genuinely short mood pieces (their titles are i ncantation, Pastoral, and Scherzetto), with, stylistically, a foot in any number of camps.

Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV547, which ended the evening, was delivered in a style that was a little too weighty to sound uplifting.