St Michael’s Church, Dún Laoghaire
DAVID BREMNER is a Cumbrian organist, pianist and composer who has been living in Ireland since 1999.
He is an active performer on the new music scene and his debut appearance at the organ series in St Michael’s Church, Dún Laoghaire, on Sunday was constructed as a kind of musical layer-cake, interweaving works from the baroque era with pieces from the 20th and 21st centuries.
The first two of the earlier pieces, Bach's Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist, BWV671, and Ricercarby Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, made for rather heavy going.
The Bach sounded so heavy it was almost congealed and the Sweelinck, in spite of added embellishments, came across as simply too literal to spark into life.
Perhaps it was a matter of nerves or of warming-up, because Frescobaldi's Capriccio sopra il cuchowas delivered with a sense of shapely line and a real spring in the rhythm.
However, Bremner still sounded rather more at home in the later music.
Two composers under 30 were represented.
Jonathan Nangle's BACH est mortis a kind of wrong-note toccata that splashes clustery chords around the place.
Benedict Schlepper-Connolly's Your Light Illuminates Everythingis deliberate and calm, presenting slow-moving melodies which tug gently at one another, but too lightly to create any real sense of tension.
Philipp Jarnach (1892-1982) is a name usually encountered in connection with the completion of his teacher Busoni's masterpiece, the opera Doktor Faust.
Jarnach was born in France to a Spanish father and a Flemish mother, and later took German citizenship.
In his years in Zurich, where he first met Busoni, he shared a house with the family of James Joyce.
I have not been able to trace any previous performances of Philipp Jarnach's work in Ireland, but his Konzertstück,Op. 21, which was written in 1928 and subtitled RomanceroIII, combines rhythmic elements reflecting his Spanish lineage with more free-flowing and sometimes angular melodic writing.
The piece delivers its various elements (which include a brightly coloured climax and a prominent pedal solo) in a way that made one want to hear it again to make sure it really does hold together.
