Skill And Variation In Pipeline

The Age

Thursday September 20, 2007

Clive O'Connell, Reviewer

JENNIFER CHOU

International Organ Series 2007 Scots' Church, Melbourne September 18, www.scotschurch.com

ON TUESDAY Jennifer Chou played a severely split program that began with a solid baroque workout, then shifted to near-contemporary French compositions that exploited the wide sound-spectrum possibilities available from the building's ever-fresh Rieger instrument.

Chou, who is director of music at St John's Anglican Church in Camberwell, started with a trio of Buxtehude pieces, passing by the Canzona in D minor with impressive dispatch before settling into one of the composer's more substantial works, the Nun fruet euch Chorale Fantasia, which proceeds through a sequence of variations that follow a clear pattern but are carried out with startling inventiveness, brought out even further by Chou's mobile approach to metre.

Bach's six trio sonatas test any interpreter's ability to the full, chiefly because of their use of three-part counterpoint evenly divided between hands and pedal-board; highly gifted performers find the composer's continuous linear interweaving a test of concentration in its simple division of labour. Chou handled the D minor sonata with few problems, despite a common tendency to drag the bass line; but the three movements bore witness to this player's dexterity.

From Messiaen's final product for the organ, the Livre du Saint Sacrement, Chou performed the openly optimistic Puer natus est nobis and a typically atmospheric Institution de l'Eucharistie, where the composer gives a quiet blaze to the words of consecration spoken at the Last Supper while from outside the chamber, with piercing unconcern, comes a nightingale's song.

In this second piece, Chou showed a fine sensitivity to Messiaen's uncluttered vision, the only defect coming from the Scots' Church's lack of echo.

Finally, we heard two of the Neuf Pieces by Langlais. The Chant de Paix emphasised the organ's clarity of enunciation, even with buzzing bourdon-rich sounds, while the Chant Heroique, written as a memorial to the composer's colleague Jehan Alain, saw Chou expanding her dynamic horizons, particularly at the haunting harmonic distortions of the cry Aux armes, citoyens! from the Marseillaise, which makes a strong musical epitaph.

© 2007 The Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home