Oliver Hancock, Lunchtime Live

Oliver Hancock, Lunchtime Live, Portsmouth Cathedral, September 8th

A new season of Lunchtime Live got underway yesterday with Sub-Organist at Portsmouth Cathedral and School Organist of Portsmouth Grammar School, Oliver Hancock's wide-ranging programme. There's posh, a school with its own organist.
The Langlais piece with which he began didn't set off in a particularly inspiring mood. Apparently trying out a few different stops for a phrase at a time, I wouldn't have been surprised if it had gone quiet and a polite round of applause been met with Ravi Shankar's 'if you enjoyed the warm-up so much, I hope you enjoy the music even more'. But the piece stirred itself into a rousing finish in time to make itself worthwhile before we graduated to much more convincing items.
Mendelssohn was in no small part responsible for re-establishing interest in Bach's music and one could hear both his own lyrical Romanticism and Bach's monumental structures in the Sonata no. 2. Which quite properly led to some of the real thing, in Allein Gott in der sei Hoch, the inclusion of which did just enough to persuade me not to hold a one-man protest that there was no Buxtehude on the menu.
For me, Marcel Dupre need not have troubled himself in composing the contrasting Four Versets on Ave Maris Stella but dates of 1886-1971 do put him squarely in a period of organ music for which I don't appear to be part of the target audience. But Naji Halim (born 1955) and his Salve Regina came as a wonderful surprise and a blessing. A gentle meditation, pretty, one could say, using woodwind effects and lilting along quite gorgeously with no aberrant diversions into horror or distress, as so many of our contempoaries seem to think is required, it turned out to be an unexpected highlight and a new name for me, at least, to look out for.
Before the lollipop finale, the attrib. Bach Fugue on the Magnificat, was authentic enough to be given a BWV number and Tuba Tune by Norman Cocker was a great, cheery way to complete the variety of music on offer. I can imagine many people thinking that an hour of church organ music could be an austere experience but it honestly doesn't have to be and it wasn't here. The concerts are now free with a retiring collection and six out of the ten in the autumn series are organ recitals but most Thursdays from now until the end of November, it will be worth a visit if you are in the area.