Deirdre Comerford, who gave Sunday's organ recital at St Michael's, Dun Laoghaire, has been studying in London this past year, and will become organ scholar of Chichester Cathedral in September. She's a native of Kilrush, Co Clare, a graduate of NUI Maynooth, and a finalist in RTE's Millennium Musician of the Future Competition.
Her style is outgoing and exuberant. Her opening performance of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV545, was brimming over with joie de vivre. And it wasn't just a matter of the spirit being willing; the fingers, too, went where they were required.
The Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch require a lot more than nimble fingers. Comerford's fondness for high contrasts of foreground and background made for quite a few problems of intelligibility in Bach's dazzling display of contrapuntal mastery. Heightening one line at the expense of another makes this music seem both simpler than it is and, paradoxically, more difficult to grasp.
Bach's chorale prelude, Schmucke dich, o liebe Seele, BWV654, served as a pivot, with two 19th-century settings of the same chorale to follow, opening up the romantic section of the programme. The logic of the sequence was crystal clear, but, given the extraordinary depth of Bach, it's one which tends to leave the later music under a shadow.
The second half of the programme seemed to reflect the taste of an organist with something of a sweet tooth. The works by Schumann were originally written for a pedalpiano, a long obsolete instrument with an organ-like pedal board. Today, the pieces are most commonly heard on the organ, where, in the absence of the piano's precise dynamic scaling, they usually acquire - as they did on this occasion - a quite un-Schumannesque fairground character. But Comerford's handling was nothing if not spirited, and in the last of the Op. 60 Fugues on Schumann's Bach she showed a sort of fearlessness which will surely stand her in good stead when she's shed some of the excesses of youth.
