St Michael’s Church, Dún Laoghaire
Bach – Prelude in E flat BWV552. Distler – Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (exc). Schoenberg – Variations on a recitative. Sokola – Passacaglia quasi toccata na tema Bach. Bach – Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland. Fugue in E flat BWV552.
David Adams offered an unusual musical layer cake in the last concert of this year’s organ series at St Michael’s on Sunday. The outer layers were the most familiar, the great Prelude and Fugue in E flat which enclose the third part of the Bach’s Clavierübung. Adams’s account was among the most vigorous I’ve heard, with no loss of musical traction or speed on what you might call the steeper inclines. The playing was visionary and visceral, fully communicative of the music’s sweep and grandeur, and thrilling in the moment by moment delivery of it.
The lighter layers were, in culinary terms, like a couple of sorbets between substantial courses. Both were by composers whose music is not often heard in concert, Hugo Distler (1908-42) and Milos Sokola (1913-76). Both were attractively virtuosic works with prominent pedal solos which Adams delivered with relish. The pieces by Distler and Sokola framed the sole organ work by Arnold Schoenberg, which was written in 1941 for a new organ music series undertaken by the US publisher HW Gray.
In spite of the date of composition, almost two decades after Schoenberg had unveiled his 12-tone method, the music is tonal. Think of it as Schoenberg coming close to the ne plus ultra of the chromatically-saturated style of Max Reger and you’ll be on the right lines. However, “clearness and transparency” were the characteristics Schoenberg wanted from performers of this piece, and Adams played it with a consistency and clarity that were astonishing.
Just before the closing fugue he included a counterpart to Distler’s Nun komm der Heiden Heiland and gave a perfectly judged account of Bach’s most famous setting of the same chorale (BWV659), calm in the slowness of its tread, gorgeous in its richness of harmony, and heartbreaking in the beautifully shaped embellishments of the upper line. Organ recitals don’t get much better than this one.
