St Michael’s, Dún Laoghaire

The organist at St Michael’s Church, was initially announced (on a flyer) as being from Russia, then (in the printed programme book) from “Byelorussia”, and finally, in a spoken introduction at the concert itself, as being Lithuanian.

On his agent’s website, Aleksandr Isakov was born in Belarus in 1972, trained in Minsk and Riga, and was granted Lithuanian citizenship in 1999.

He is the organist of the Church of the Virgin Mary in Vilnius, and introduced himself to Irish listeners through a programme that alternated familiar names (Bach, Guilmant, Dupré and Reger) with altogether less familiar ones from the Baltic states and Russia (Vidmantas Bartulis, Alfred Karindi, and Oleg Yanchenko).

Isakov’s approach to Bach in the Prelude and Fugue in E minor, BWV548, was hefty and brisk, with changes of registration that were abrupt enough to be musically jolting.

There was energy aplenty, sometimes of a slightly tumbling nature, in Guilmant’s Third Sonata and Dupré’s Prelude and Fugue in G minor, both of which Isakov delivered with a real sense of flamboyance. And he ended with Reger’s Variations and Fugue on

God Save the Queen

, written on the death of Queen Victoria on a tune that at the time also served as an anthem in German territories.

The Passacaglia in D minor by the Estonian composer Alfred Karindi (1901-69) had too much inconsequential-sounding chromaticism to allow for the kind of musical traction that’s normally associated with the periodicity of a passacaglia. And the Meditation by the Russian organist and composer Oleg Yanchenko (1939-2002), who was one of Isakov’s teachers, was a mostly quiet essay in nostalgia.

Altogether more intriguing was

The Vision of 17 July 1750

by the Lithuanian Vidmantas Bartulis (born 1954), which grew out of a minimalistically slow pulsation under sustained, clustery chords to create a window that revealed some genuine Bach, before ending without resolution, suspended as it were in mid-air, a reference, presumably (the St Michael’s concerts provide no programme notes) to the fact that in the middle of the month that he died (July 1750) Bach had experienced a temporary restoration of his sight.