Grand Choeur in D (alla Handel) - Guilmant

Voluntary in G minor Op 5 No 7 - Stanley

Toccata in A - Alessandro Scarlatti

Le Cercle de LumiΦre - Eric Sweeney

An Wasserflussen Babylon BWV663 - Bach

Nun danket alle Gott BWV657 - Bach

Toccata and Fugue in F BWV540 - Bach

Gerard Gillen's recital at St Michael's Church, D·n Laoghaire, last Sunday night was stylistically wide-ranging and authoritative. In this mainly Baroque programme, playing was informed by historical performance practice, but never doctrinaire.

Too often, early music is played in a catch-all manner, as if the same style is equally effective in Bach, Byrd, Scarlatti and even in Romantic contrapuntists, such as Franck and Reger. So it was good to hear such differing approaches to a voluntary by the 18th-century Englishman John Stanley, a toccata by the late 17th-century Italian Alessandro Scarlatti, and to the impressive, Handelian Grand Choeur, by the 19th-century French virtuoso Alexandre Guilmant.

Eric Sweeney's Le Cercle de LumiΦre was premiered in this series last year by the composer's brother Peter. Gerard Gillen played it in a less frenetic, more deliberate manner than Peter Sweeney did (and probably still does); but it is a mark of this work's idiomatic writing for the organ that it can comfortably withstand such differences.

Is the Scarlatti really as quirky as the registration and articulation made it sound? I doubt it. In Bach's Toccata and Fugue in F BWV540, emphasising startling harmonic side-steps in the last half meant a loss of the sprung, one-in-a-bar rhythm which drove the opening canons. Yet as with everything in this recital, the playing's decisiveness had a sense of purpose which made one take notice.

Series continues on Sunday at St Michael's Church, D·n Laoghaire, at 8.30 pm, with a recital by Sarah Baldock