Toccata Festiva - Barber

Poeme de l'amour et de la mer Chausson Symphony No 3 (Organ) - SaintSaens

Samuel Barber's Toccata Festiva is just what the title indicates, a festive toccata, written for the inauguration of the Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia in 1960. It's a loud and shallow piece, relying on a combination of bluster and facile lyricism, and probably needs a touch more vulgarity than the well-mannered Kenneth Jones organ of the NCH can muster. Birmingham's city organist, Thomas Trotter, and the Ulster Orchestra under South African-born Gerard Korsten, played it for all it was worth at the opening of their concert at the NCH on Saturday.

Sylvie Sulle was the oddly detached soloist in the Poeme de l'amour et de la mer by Ernest Chausson, one of the most ardent of 19th-century French Wagnerians. She clearly has the vocal equipment to deal with this most elusive of works, but never really mustered the necessary sense of engagement on this occasion.

Korsten, a one-time leader of both the Camerata Academica Salzburg and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, secured an exceptionally sympathetic and delicately-nuanced performance of SaintSaens's Organ Symphony.

It's the grand entry of the organ in the middle of the second part which has made the symphony famous, but Korsten devoted loving attention to unusually interesting textures Saint-Saens exploited in this piece, and found a sustained and poignant expressiveness, with much huskily delicate string tone, in the slow section of the first part.

I've heard more glamorous concert performances of this symphony, and ones with a more exciting thrust, but none that conveyed the work as such a solid and substantial musical achievement.