St Michael's, Dún LaoghaireCouperin: Offertoire sur les grands jeux. Elevation: Tierce en taille. Pachelbel: Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern. Fuga in F. Schumann: Fugue Op 60 No 1. Mendelssohn: Prelude and Fugue in D minor Op 37 No 3. Hindemith: Sonata No 2. Reger: Pastorale; Introduction and Passacaglia in D minor.
David Connolly is the organist of St Michael’s Church, in Dún Laoghaire in Co Dublin, and has been the director of its long-standing summer-recital series, which runs weekly until September 5th, since 2007.
The programme he chose for his own recital on Sunday was both compact and varied. He came across as a player whose heart was most closely aligned with the romanticism of Schumann and Mendelssohn. Both composers were represented in contrapuntal mode, Schumann through a rugged account of the first of the six fugues on the name Bach, Mendelssohn through the last of his Op 37 Preludes and Fugues, where Connolly took the composer at his word and delivered the ad-libitum flourishes of the prelude with shapely freedom.
The opening pieces by François Couperin (a jolly and solemn pairing from the Messe pour les Couvents) and Johann Pachelbel (whose musical profile, apart from his celebrated Canon, is largely in the world of the organ) were not helped by a looseness of rhythm that at times sounded almost slithery.
The breezy tempo he set for the opening of Hindemith’s Second Organ Sonata was thoroughly invigorating, however, in spite of the excessive legato. At his best, Connolly would seem to be one of those performers who plays rather like a composer, with potentially undermining technical considerations fading into insignificance when the musical vision itself is so cogent and clear.
The closing Introduction and Passacaglia in D minor by Max Reger is not the kind of piece that always sits easily with the nature of the neoclassical Rieger organ of St Michael’s. But Connolly captured enough of the spirit of its splattily energetic heavy chords and its slow, recurring surges to bring the evening to an exciting close.
