St Michael’s, Dún Laoghaire
Kuhnau
– Biblical Sonata No 1 (The Battle Between David and Goliath).
Stephen Paulus
– King David’s Dance. Schlick – Salve Regina. Maria Zart.
Hindemith
– Sonata No 1.
Bach
– Toccata and Fugue in C, BWV566.
Uwe Bestert, who has for the last two decades been directing the music at St Gertrude’s Lutheran Church in Hamburg, returned to St Michael’s, Dún Laoghaire, with a fascinating programme last weekend.
He opened with the first of the BiblicalSonatas by Johann Kuhnau (1660-1722), Bach's immediate predecessor as cantor of the Thomanerkirche in Leipzig. Kuhnau's Musical Representation of Several Biblical Stories,in the form of sonatas for keyboard, appeared in 1700, and the works are among the earliest of their kind, both as sonatas and as programmatic sonatas.
The idea behind them, it has to be said, is actually more appealing than the music itself, which is rather too naive for the representations Kuhnau had in mind. Naivety was found, too, in the unevenly choppy, post-Hindemith style of King David's Dance, by American composer Stephen Paulus.
Bestert’s dutiful performances, with registrations that sounded unnecessarily thick in parts of the Kuhnau, did not really help the music. And the two pieces by the blind German organist and composer, Arnolt Schlick (c1460-c1521), suffered also from the limited articulation and shaping that were offered by Bestert’s always technically reliable playing.
Hindemith’s First Organ Sonata sounded overlong in Bestert’s hands. It was only in the closing work, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, BWV566, heard in the C major version rather than the more frequently performed version in E, that he finally managed to lift the music on to a more engaging plane.
