Simon Preston Prom: Royal Albert Hall
3:12pm Wednesday 27th August 2008
Admittedly it's a rarefied category, but I'd like to propose a new award: "Most Plugged Concert Ever Given by a Former Christ Church Director of Music". The winner, without doubt, would be Simon Preston, for his organ recital on Bach Day at this year's BBC Proms. Rarely, it seemed, did 15 minutes pass last week on Radio 3 without yet another plug. Surely an organist with Preston's pedigree in the Bach repertoire didn't need such high pressure salesmanship?
And Simon Preston doesn't just have pedigree in Bach, he has championed the Royal Albert Hall's vast and magnificent organ through thick and thin - including the bad old days, when a player could not be certain that parts of the instrument would work at all. Now the organ has been magnificently restored, and has enough wind pressure to sustain the beefiest fortissimo. "I've always regretted that it was never able to do what you wanted it to do," Preston told me in an Oxford Times interview. "Now it all absolutely works, and everything comes together, whether you're playing quietly or loudly."
The power of the organ was fully demonstrated in the first work, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. In surely the best-known organ piece ever written, Preston firmly resisted any temptation to wallow, instead phrasing the music in disciplined, almost clipped, style. Stop selections were transparent, so that you could clearly hear the different strands of the music at all times - a characteristic that was evident throughout this recital. The D Minor ended in a blaze of powerful reeds, to be followed by a complete contrast, the Canonic Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch". Here, and in a couple of Chorale Preludes and a Duetto later in the programme, Simon Preston demonstrated the versatility of the Albert Hall organ - it sounded much less like a huge English beast, much more the sort of silvery-toned, delicate instrument that Bach himself would have played. In turn, these smaller-scale works contrasted well with the magisterial Prelude and Fugue in E flat major, "St Anne", with which this satisfying recital concluded.