{TABLE} Est-ce Mars.............................................Sweelinck Concerto in D minor BWV596..............................Bach/ Vivaldi Pilgrims' Chorus (Tannhauser)...........................Wagner (arr. Lemare) Composition on Three Staves............................ Andrew Synnott Chorale No.2 in B minor.................................Franck Herzlich shut mich verlangen............................Brahms Et ist ein Ros entsprungen..............................Brahms Non danket alle Gott....................................Karg-Elert {/TABLE} SHANE Brennan's organ recital at the National Concert Hall last Friday lunchtime raised fundamental questions about performance practice. Like many organists nowadays, Brennan plays Romantic music under the influence of historical performance concepts developed for Baroque music. Out with the old view, which saw Baroque music through tinted, tainted, fading Romantic spectacles; in with another distortion.
At least the old practice was a stylistic accretion, a testament to the music's enduring value. The new approach to Romantic music is a perversion - an insidious, instinct-smothering correctness.
This was all too evident in the late-Romantic music which dominated the programme, Brennan's immediate energy and flamboyance notwithstanding. Pushy speeds and pointed articulation of detail and cadences - nowadays de rigueur in Baroque music - are antithetical to the organ-as-orchestra concepts which inspired Franck's Chorale in B minor and Lemare's transcription of The Pilgrims' Chorus from Wagner's Tannhauser. Nor are they congruent with such Baroque-inspired music as Brahms's chorale preludes.
