{TABLE} Tocrata duoderima .......................... Moffat Passacaglia in D minor ..................... Keril Sei gegrusset, Jesu gutig BWV768 ........... Bach Sonata in B flat, Op 65 No 4 ............... Mendelssohn 3 Hymn-tune Preludes ....................... John Gardner Behold a Pair Horse ........................ Stephen Montague Variations on "The Star spangled Banner .... Buck {/TABLE} THIS year's series of Dun Laoghaire organ recitals began last Sunday with a recital by Catherine Ennis. The satisfaction offered by her playing was as variable as the programmes compositional styles, which embraced Baroque music from Germany, a Mendelssohn sonata and three works by British and American composers.
Catherine Ennis seems to thrive on flashy music. In the Baroque pieces her playing was shapely but not very engaging. Bach's beautiful but overlong Partita on Sei gegrusset, Jesu gutig, BWV 768, for example, needs something more distinctive and penetrating than it received. Mendelssohn's Sonata in A flat (Op. 65, No. 4) was played in an extraordinarily unRomantic way.
The three more recent works were much more convincing and enjoyable. Three Hymntune Preludes by the British composer John Gardner (born 1917) apply Baroque chorale prelude techniques and a quirky, neo Classical vocabulary to well known hymn tunes. Ennis's ultraspiky, Baroque registrations made them seem even more quirky than they are; but they worked. So did Behold a Pale Horse, by the American composer Stephen Montague (born 1943), the modern idiom of which has the sort of brash vulgarity which one can find in early Liszt.
Ennis brought an equally hard driven, flamboyant style to Variations on "The Star spangled Banner", by Dudley Buck, the late 19th century virtuoso. This piece transcends vulgarity as only Americans can. I did not know whether to wince, laugh or be dumb struck. It brought the house down.
