Samuel Ali, organ, Portsmouth Caathedral, 26 April
Samuel Ali, organist at Christ Church in Chelsea and student at the Royal College of Music, was today's attraction at Portsmouth Cathdral with a new season of Lunchtime Live ! underway.
On a day that has turned out unnervingly well so far, it was too much to expect Buxtehude on the programme but one is always more than happy with a generous helping of Bach.
The sinfonia from Cantata 29 was a bright opening before we proceeded to the main item of interest, for me, the Prelude and Fugue in B flat minor from The Well-Tempered Klavier. Presumably composed on and imaagined for harpsichord, I'm used to it on piano that Bach wasn't to know about and so an organ version was new to me although surely not that rare.
I wouldn't have recognized it in its early stages, much as the hugely impressive Buxtehude Trio Sonata on Monday didn't sound like either version I have on disc, but that's performance for you, endlessly re-inventing, and Max Reger's transcription builds powerfully and inexorably to a sustained, moving final passage worthy of a cathedral organ setting.
Frocker's Pastorale twisted arond in the upper register, eerie more thyan pastorale but being C20th (d. 1990), one expects less than tub-thumping counterpoint. In common with so much C20th music, which seems emphasized all the more in organ music, one is aware of fractured human experience even if the left hand (I imagine) here added some gentle ambient accompaniment.
Back to Bach and reassured by the fine, upstanding and rigorous Prelude and Fugue in G major, BWV 541, one did wonder if that might not have been best saved until last.
Marcel Dupre's Prelude and Fugue in G minor, op.7, published 'before 1923', my minimal research tells me, began shell-shocked and uncertain, inevitably making me think it was a reaction to World War 1. That was no 'age of enlightenment' and the cofidence of Bach and Handel is gone. It was cheerier in the Fugue, however and rounded off powerfully, like a resurgence of the spirit and so the programming was convincingly justified.
It is a pity these lunchtime recitals are not better supported, compared to Chichester's well-populated events on Tuesdays but Portsmouth Cathedral is not so advantageously positioned down there. I had a tremendous Spring Day in Southsea almost to myself only to emerge to find it had been raining but do get yourself down there if you can. I never regret it.