There was a delayed start to the opening of the new NCH/The Irish Times Celebrity Concert Series at the National Concert Hall last night. The unfortunate organist, Wayne Marshall, had to struggle with a glitch which lost him his chosen stop combinations - he described it as a computer crash - and it took the best part of 30 minutes to get it all sorted out.
The audience's patience was rewarded with an evening dominated by svelte trumpet playing from Norway's Ole Edvard Antonsen and breezily upbeat organ contributions from Marshall. It's a style of playing that's more likely to tell you about the technical ability of the performer than illuminate the character of the music.
The duo essayed the baroque (Telemann, Martini, Charpentier, Vejvanovsky) and the modern, an anodyne Prayer of St Gregory and (assuming I picked up the alteration to the programme correctly) a sonata by Naji Hakim, which sounded like a chirpy homage to Jean Francaix and wouldn't have been out of place on the soundtrack of Jacques Tati's film Jour de Fete.
The pieces for trumpet and organ by Stanley Weiner, onetime leader of the New York Philharmonic, offered little of interest, but the short solo trumpet Fanfare by another US composer, Stan Friedman, seemed to open up lots of unusual possibilities for echo effects, both layered and smoothly-transitioned.
Marshall, who's currently organist-in-residence at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, played two solos, giving a clipped, almost martial account of the Finale from Vierne's First Symphony (which replaced the advertised Vexilla regis prodeunt by Hakim) and unleashing an unbridled dance of virtuosity in Franck's Final, Op. 21.
The duo seemed at their best when Marshall abandoned the organ for the piano for a group of jazzy, easy-listening numbers. And I got the impression that the audience would have appreciated it had a greater proportion of the evening been spent in this area of the duo's repertoire.
