Reviews

A look at what is happening in the world of the arts

Anne Leahy (organ)

St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire

Bach - Fantasia and Fugue in G minor BWV542. Komm Heiliger Geist BWV652. O Lamm Gottes unschuldig BWV656. Wenn wir in höchsten Nöthen sein BWV641, BWV668a. Langlais - Suite Française (exc)

Anne Leahy, who gave Sunday's organ recital at St Michael's, has been the organist and director of music at the church for more than 20 years, and is also the director of the annual series of organ recitals there.

Her great musical love is Bach, and he accounted for five of the six works on the programme. Even her spoken introduction to the final piece, Jean Langlais's Suite Française of 1949, went out of its way to highlight connections between it and the practices of Bach.

The musical delivery was solid in manner, and appeared to be monumental in intention, Bach's works laid out in all their grandeur, nothing superfluous, nothing leavened.

At times the approach was too even in finish. Komm, Heiliger Geist, BWV652, was approached with an earnestness which seemed to take little account of what has been described as "the somewhat doctrinaire nature of the counterpoint" in this, the longest of Bach's chorale preludes. The outcome, in spite of the ornate embellishments, sounded oddly featureless. On the other hand, Ms Leahy used the colours of the organ resourcefully, achieving a kind of full, bold clarity.

Her approach on Sunday, however, had something of the air of preaching to the converted about it. Having made her choices of tempo and registration, she seemed mostly happy to let the music unfold without rhetorical intervention. Bach, of course, is one of the safest composers for that particular approach.

Michael Dervan

Rizwan - Muazzam Qawwali Group

St Canice's Cathedral, Kilkenny

If the Pakistani singer Rizwan Mujahid Ali Khan is impressed by the cloistered beauty of St Canice's Cathedral, his face betrays nothing. And yet what a sight the nephew of the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan makes, sitting with his brother Muazzam and eight other musicians on a raised dais, preparing to sing the traditions of Islamic Sufi mysticism while the stained glass panels of Christian imagery glow vividly behind them.

It is tempting to believe that there is an unspoken affinity between Qawwali, the devotional music of Sufism, and this medieval place of worship, both of which are roughly contemporaneous.

However, there is not-so-obvious tension for the audience: where the Qawwali urges devotion, ecstasy and abandonment, the vertiginous arches and long halls of Gothic architecture are designed to instil a sense of awe.

Easing through delicate enunciations into loosening drones and the sonorous responses of the group, the exuberance of Rizwan's performance swells to fill the space.

The tabla drums begin a conversation of chattering beats skirting around deep reverberations, but the six-man clapping section is more viscerally affecting. In their brisk slaps, charging tempos and Muazzam's wordless exhortations, the corporeal world reaches out to the ethereal.

In the Qawwali, which does not shy from mingling romantic love with spiritual adoration, the music of the body can also be the sound of the soul. Distinguishing between songs in praise of Allah, the prophet Ali, or "a praise song and a love song", Rizwan whirls between agony and ecstasy in his improvised phrases: here guttural; now soaring. At one point steam rises from the performers in a hazy aura.

Their transcendence is extraordinary to behold, but hard to share. Whether a curious audience was here for spiritual immersion or exotic aesthetic may be answered by the flash of yet another camera.

Peter Crawley