Philip Scriven (organ)

PHILIP Scriven, who gave Sunday's recital at St Michael's, Dun Laoghaire, is a recent Royal College of Organists Performer of the Year. His pedigree showed as he introduced himself with a bright and breezy performance of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV541, delivered almost as if in a single breath.

He followed this with Brahms's Fugue in A flat minor, an early, atypical piece from the small body of organ music left by one of the few great composers of the 19th century to have left anything of any note for the organ.

The immediacy of Scriven's communicative skills as a performer were better evidenced in the richly reedy solo from Janacek's Glagolitic Mass, which he discharged with fanfarish flamboyance.

However, the Variations on Victimae paschali laudes by the Czech organist, Jiri Ropek, remained too consistently in vapid, show-off mode to sustain much musical interest.

Three of the chorale preludes from Flor Peeters' Op. 39, fleet and sweet as required, preceded the closing item, Peter Warlock's Capriol Suite. Here, Scriven's arrangement allowed for a thrust and punch, as well as a far greater range of colouring (including the tinkling of the Zimbelstern) than are available from the string orchestra of the composer's original.