The Irish Times reviews Barley, Leigh, Adams

Barley, Leigh, Adams

St Audoen’s, Dublin

DUBLIN’S INTERNATIONAL organ and choral festival Pipeworks has taken up the cudgels on Mendelssohn’s behalf. This year marks the bicentenary of the composer’s birth, and Pipeworks is presenting an out-of-festival, four-concert series of organ and choral music at St Audoen’s, juxtaposing music by Mendelssohn and Bach.

The connection between the two composers is a famous one. Mendelssohn conducted the 1829 performance of the St Matthew Passion which played a crucial role in winning Bach the kind of widespread appreciation we take for granted today. His engagement with Bach also affected his own composing, and the programmes at St Audoen’s could not but fail to highlight this. Mendelssohn’s six organ sonatas were commissioned by an English publisher who had also paid the composer to edit some of Bach’s organ music for publication, and the sonatas show a Bachian interest in chorales and fugues. Mendelssohn also wrote sets of preludes and fugues for piano and well as organ.

The third of the St Audoen’s concerts divided the honours between three organists, Peter Barley, David Leigh and David Adams. Barley seemed set on releasing a strength of sonority from the church’s 1861 Walker organ that was greater than he could comfortably handle. There was a heavily effortful, almost snorting strength to the pedal line in Bach’s Prelude in E minor, BWV548, but there was also no denying that it interfered with the just balance of the music.

Leigh and Adams chose to work with mostly lighter sounds, and scored greater successes. Leigh was at his virtuosic best in Nicholas Kynaston's arrangement of a Prelude and Fugue in Em, originally for piano solo. And Adams, who played the Organ Sonata in D and the Prelude and Fugue in Dm, sought a long- breathed drive which he strove to leaven with some unusual twists of rubato along the way. MICHAEL DERVAN