The British duo of Gareth Price and Graham Howell have been playing organ duets for over 15 years, since they were both organ scholars at Durham University. Their programme at St Michael's, D·n Laoghaire, on Sunday was well larded with arrangements, but had as its centrepiece an original work, the prizewinning D minor Sonata of 1858 by the little-known Dresden based composer Gustav Merkel.
It says a lot about both programme and playing that the Merkel was in many ways the most satisfying experience on offer in a programme that included music by far greater composers arrangements of Dvorak (a Slavonic Dance), Vivaldi (a movement from The Four Seasons), Grieg (In the Hall of the Mountain King) and Johann Strauss (the Radetzky March).
Price and Howell approached the organ as orchestra challenge with a strong taste for the grotesque. In Dvorak and Vivaldi they were stiff beyond belief, and the opening of the Grieg was too absurdly wide of the mark to be even amusing.
Admittedly, the Rieger organ at St Michael's is not an instrument ideally suited to this sort of undertaking. But there has been many another performance there, with just a single pair of hands and feet, to show how much more successful this sort of undertaking can be.
Price and Howell appeared, on the evidence of Sunday's playing, to be clinically tidy players, of classical orientation.
The original music in their programme, by Albrechtsberger, Cooke, Langlais and Rutter, plus the Merkel (none of it first-rate stuff) was solidly, unimaginatively done.
On this occasion, it has to be said, the use of twice the number of fingers and feet resulted in no special effect.
