LUDGER Lohmann has an international reputation as a scholar as well as a performer, fields which some musicians seem to believe are not just distinct but at best incompatible. At the National Concert Hall on Friday evening, in a recital given as part of the hall's Bach series, Lohmann showed just how complementary scholarship and performance can be. He regularly plays organ music from the earliest periods to the present day but his scholarly reputation rests on his studies of articulation in keyboard music from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

Many organists can quote treatises to the beating of the band. But all too often their application of these explanations results in mannerisms which run against musical commonsense. Lohmann is not like that, for his crisp articulation was a means, not an end.

There were no spectacular, display pieces on his triple decker programme, which comprised three Preludes and Fugues (in A BWV561, in D minor BWV539 and in C BWV547), sandwiching several chorale preludes. Yet this was a rewarding recital which produced clear textures, purposeful ornamentation, superb pacing and resourceful registration.

Above all, Lohmann has a profound understanding of the Baroque rhetorical concepts which motivated composers of that time - at which Bach was peerless. So, for Durch Adams Fall BWV637, we had darkly coloured reeds, superb for this universal, gloomy subject, in which Bach represents the serpent via sinuous chromatics in the inner parts. In the two settings of Valet will ich dir geben BWV735 and 736, Lohmann's playing and registration revealed just how resourceful Bach could be in interpreting a single text.