It's 10 years since the Kenneth Jones organ which now graces the auditorium of the National Concert Hall was installed and inaugurated.
The 10th anniversary of the inauguration was celebrated at the NCH on Thursday in a joint recital given by Gerard Gillen (whose campaigning played a major part in the decision to commission an instrument for the NCH) and Peter Sweeney, both players who have frequently performed from the console of this organ.
The celebratory evening was mostly light in tone. The two players went through their paces in display pieces from the French repertoire, Guilmant, Gigout and ThΘodore Dubois for Gillen, Vierne and Hakim for Sweeney. Sweeney also undertook two arrangements, the Scherzo from Bruckner's Symphony in D minor (the Nullte) and Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, both, unfortunately, despatched with an uncomfortable haste which tended to obliterate the characteristics of the originals.
Sweeney was in altogether better form in Le Cercle de LumiΘre by Eric Sweeney (his brother). This piece is built on a returning pattern that carries a certain fascination, but the idea is kept going rather longer than the momentum which sustains it.
W.T. Best's Concert Fantasia on a Welsh March provided a forum for Marx Brothers-like musical high jinks heightened by the sobriety and formality of the recital setting.
Gillen leaned offered in Arvo PΣrt's Trivium the most austere music-making of the evening, and also, in a firmly projected reading of Bach's great St Anne Prelude and Fugue, the deepest and most rewarding.
The Jones organ, which tended to sound too soft-spoken in many of its early recitals, was in altogether fuller voice on Thursday.
Quite simply, it baulked at none of the many challenges the two men presented it.