To jaded old pros, like myself, going to an organ
recital has long since lost its allure.
The prospect of hearing a player (whom we’ve usually heard before),
playing music (which we already know) on an organ (the sound of which is
familiar to us) is not in itself what keeps us going along time after time. What attracts us is the unique juxtaposition
of all three. We are fascinated to hear
what music (and why) such-and-such an organist has chosen to include in the programme,
how it’s going to sound on the organ and what the organist does to the music and
to the organ which make both sound different.

Trotter was in Singapore last night for only the
second time. His previous visit was to
open the Esplanade Klais organ in 2002 – a recital which in terms of pure sonic
sumptuousness has not been equalled, and certainly has not been bettered, in the
intervening 17 years. Sadly, this
recital promised no such sonic sumptuousness, for he was not playing on the
wonderful and disgracefully under-used Esplanade organ, but on its older,
smaller, and much less sumptuous, sister organ in the Victoria Concert
Hall. Built by Klais in the 1980s, this
horrid and ugly little thing dates back to a period when shrill and piercing
were considered preferable to mellow and soothing. The hall’s rebuild and acoustic re-modelling
in 2014 did it no favours, and the final nail in its coffin came when someone
decided to suspend a dozen or so Perspex screens over the stage. The jury is still out on these so far as the
audience is concerned at orchestral concerts (and with their highly reflective
surfaces, they provide a disturbing visual distraction by mirroring, upside
down, everything that is going on on stage), but there is no question that
their arrival signalled the final departure of any vestiges of acoustic breadth
to alleviate the hard-edged, nasty sound of the organ. Listening to it in the hall is not so much
like receiving a punch in the face, as experiencing that sensation you have
standing near the back of a Singapore bus; being blasted by an inescapable
barrage of heat and feeling grubby from the perceived exposure to oil-fired
fumes. (And I speak as a tireless admirer of Singapore buses.)
Trotter’s programme seemed to be planned with the Esplanade
in mind, and I was not alone in wondering how big, aural spectaculars such as
Liszt’s BACH Prelude & Fugue and
Edwin Lemare’s classic transcription of Elgar’s Pomp & Circumstance March No.1 could possibly succeed on the
Victoria Hall organ with its single-minded devotion to looking and sounding
like people in the 1980s imagined the organs of Buxtehude’s time to look and
sound. But Trotter is not one of the world’s
greatest and most communicative organists for nothing, and what he can’t do
with an organ simply isn’t worth knowing.
Perhaps he resorted a little too often to the full
organ sound – with big pieces on a small organ, that is inevitable – but he
managed to alleviate the fundamentally offensive quality of what organists
describe as the “pleno” (basically,
pulling out all the stops to make the loudest noise) by the ingenious device of
surrounding each pleno with a little
bit of space. This not only took the
strain off our ears, but more importantly, it prevented an inevitable
consequence of wind-powered pipe organs (a problem those who play their
electronic cousins do not have and do not even think about); when you play lots of notes together with all
the pipes sounding (and it is worth pointing out to the uninitiated that a
single key depressed on the organ can send wind up several dozen pipes simultaneously,
some of which are well over five metres in length) you use up a great deal of
wind, and smaller organs (and quite a few large ones too) simply don’t have
that much wind in reserve. The result is
a marked drop in pitch. This happened
time and time again when Trotter trotted out the pleno, but by his judicious use of pauses and small breaks in the
flow, he was able to avoid that horrible moment when the drop in pitch is cruelly
laid bare as intonation is restored to normal service. It was little tricks like that, which are the
hallmarks of a truly fine organist, which helped make the Victoria Hall organ sound
quite acceptable.
I must have heard the Victoria Hall organ dozens of
times (I even played it myself on a couple of occasions, when it was in the
pre-rebuilt hall) and never, in all those performances, have I ever heard it
sound so nice as it did here. It’s still
an ugly little instrument, but under Trotter’s infinitely caring ministrations,
it revealed surprising delights. Trotter clearly felt that the soft flute stops
of the organ were its biggest charmers, and he used them frequently to very
great effect – even highlighting them in his encore, the inevitable Humoresque (Toccatina) by Pietro Yon, a composer
known for just two works; the standard encore piece which all organists have up
their sleeves, and a Christmas song which Pavarotti invariably used as his
encore piece (Gesu Bambino).
As for the programme itself, it did come up with one novelty
for me in the shape of a transcription for organ solo of J C Bach’s Harpsichord
Concerto Op.1 No.6. Using the flutes and
playing with delightfully crisp and nimble fingerwork, Trotter opened my eyes
to something I don’t think I had ever heard before – and something which I
would very much hope to hear again. For
me, this was very much the musical highlight of his programme.
The programme ostensibly celebrated the bi-centenary
of modern Singapore’s founding and its absorption into the British Empire. But drawing on his vast repertory, Trotter,
opened the recital with a collection of party-pieces which had nothing to do
with 1819, Singapore, or, indeed, the British Empire. Their unifying factor was Bach, but not quite
as you might expect.

Deliberately modelled on Bach’s Toccata, Adagio and Fugue, Alberto Ginastera’s Toccata, Villancico and Fugue on BACH (Op.18) dates from 1947 and
is often trotted out by organists because, like similar pieces by Britten,
Tippett and Shostakovich, it is the only organ work by a notable 20th
century composer. I’m not sure it has
many other selling points, although in his charming spoken introductions to the
programme, Trotter did suggest that we listen out for a moment which was his particular
favourite in the piece (and, yes, it highlighted the soft flutes). The mere fact that he had told us to listen
out for this, helped most of the audience get through what was really a rather
unattractive if (for organists) interesting piece of music.
It was lucky for us that Trotter did offer fluently delivered
and easily-grasped spoken introductions, for the printed programme notes
offered nothing of interest and were embarrassing by their peddling of basic
errors and misinformation. Few other organists, however, could have got away
with telling his audience that “they were in for a treat” when describing the
way he was to play his next work. But
even the most ardent Liszt-iophile would hardly say that their God-like Hero
was at his best in the Prelude &
Fugue on BACH, with its obsessive, manic reiterations of the four-note
figure which, in German notation, spells out the letters B-A-C-H. It’s certainly a popular organ piece, because
it makes lots of noise and goes very fast.
Trotter did not disappoint in either regard, and his virtuosity, as well
as the incredible clarity of sound, meant that we did, indeed, hear, as
promised, “every single note”.


Ending with a couple of Elgar transcriptions, there
was a welcome sense of release and celebration, which is not to say that they
weren’t both brilliantly played and magnificently brought across on the
organ. But by that time we had all become
so accustomed to Trotter’s effortless virtuosity and easy communication, that
we neither noticed the breath-taking virtuosity nor the limitations of the
organ, and simply revelled in superlative music-making. That was an organ recital well worth going
to, even for us jaded old pros.