Organ festival must change its tune

Every recurrent event has its natural time-span. Since it was founded in 1980, the Dublin International Organ and Choral Festival has achieved much. But new thinking will be required if it is to thrive in the future.

This year's festival, the 10th, featured an impressive catalogue of events spread over nine days and nine venues: five organ recitals; four concerts for choir and organ; two orchestral concerts featuring works for organ and orchestra; three mornings of master-classes; the organ competition (reviewed separately); three special choral services; and a concert by the choirs of the three Dublin cathedrals.

Several of the concerts I attended stood out. (Those by the choir of King's College Cambridge, and organists Wolfgang Zerer and Ewald Kooiman have been reviewed already in this newspaper.) In St Patrick's Cathedral on Thursday night there was a thoroughly respectable performance of Haydn's The Creation, given by the combined cathedral choirs, a good line-up of soloists, the RTE Concert Orchestra and conductor John Dexter.

At Trinity College Chapel on Wednesday lunchtime, the choir of St George's Church, Belfast was startling in its homogeneity, range of colour, volume and expression. At the National Concert Hall on Friday evening, Peter Sweeney played the solo part in Copland's Organ Symphony with a telling mix of panache and sensitivity. Finally, there was the accomplished recital at St Michael's Church Dun Laoghaire last Sunday night, by the winner of the previous organ competition in 1996, Neil Cockburn. All the other organ recitals were given by members of the competition jury.

Programming is one of the intermittent weaknesses in many composite events. The French symphonic-organ school dominated Michelle Leclerc's masterly recital at the Pro-Cathedral. Yet the absence of any large-scale French piece suggested a lost opportunity. In the Tuesday lunchtime orchestral concert at the NCH, Hindemith's Organ Concerto was replaced, without explanation, by Barber's Toccata festiva, a bizarre piece which even the sparkling solo work of David Adams could not redeem.

For slightly different reasons, Simon Preston's organ recital at the NCH was problematic. It was admirable for total control of the instrument and the audience. Even the page-turning was choreographed. But it was also frustrating - glitzy style rather than substance.

The festival's founding father, Gerard Gillen, who has headed eight of the 10 festivals, is stepping down as artistic director; and I doubt that volunteer and part-time staff can sustain the festival into the next century, even with goodwill, energy and deserved sponsorship.

Professionalism means money; but it is also a mode of thinking. Consider Friday's lunch-time concert at the NCH, given by David Lee and the men of Trinity College Chapel Choir. Here was a specialist event: a complete performance of Couperin's Messe pour les Paroisses, involving 21 short organ pieces with plainchant interpolations. Yet there was a good-sized audience. It felt like a pointer to the future: stylish and sensitive performing, and programming which was informed, informative, conceptual and utterly uncompromising.