A LARGE man reached out and shook my hand as I entered St Patrick's Cathedral on Friday evening. "I'm Carlo Curley, the organist," he explained, as if anyone turning up at St Patrick's Cathedral was unlikely to know that the world's No 1 proselytising preacher/salesman/virtuoso/ showman of the organ was in town to give the first George Hewson Memorial Recital.
Curley didn't just play the organ. He milked his audience like a stand up comic. He introduced the pieces and some of the tunes, sold his recordings, promised autographs, and had himself relayed from his invisible lofty perch at the St Patrick's console on three large screens.
It all adds up to quite an act, and Curley is quite a performer, to boot. He treated us to a handful of arrangements, a Bach with trombones version of the Sinfonia from Cantata 29, All through the night with an opening at the threshold of audibility, and highly coloured bits of Handel, Elgar, Wagner and Walford Davies. And he threw in for good measure a piece with fabricated bird song by the little known 18th century English composer Michael Festing.
The more substantial fare was provided by Bach, Reger and Mozart. In Curley's fanciful hands, the Willis organ, not the readiest medium for baroque music, yielded Bach's A minor Prelude and Fugue, BWV543, as some minor, ill bred cousin of the Widor Toccata. And with excessive highlighting of the recurrent chorale tune and some failures bin rhythmic cohesion, Reger's characteristically chromatic extended Fantasia on Wieschon leuchtet der Morgenstern didn't hold together convincingly. On the other hand Mozart's Fantasy in F minor, K608, had a fearless buoyancy and exuberance that was rivalled only by the evening's single encore, an arrangement of Sousa's Liberty Bell which found Curley at his flamboyantly swaggering best.
