Cantrill pulls out the stops

By WILLIAM DART

Wellington organist Andrew Cantrill is a livewire. He's the man behind the musical events happening around the city's Cathedral of St Paul, and it's not all fugues and toccatas.

A while back, Cantrill organised a screening of Cecil B. DeMille's silent classic, King of Kings, and provided a flamboyant organ accompaniment. There's some of this same theatricality, along with a Gothic thrill or two, in the thundering chords and wild flourishes that open Fete, his new Trust CD.

This is music to convert the stoniest of hearts to the cause of the French organ school and Cantrill presents it all so fetchingly that it's easy to overlook the occasional clatter and rattle of the instrument.

In fact, over many listenings, I've become rather fond of this very human reminder of the mechanism behind it all, a little like those tell-tale pencil sketchings showing through a wash of watercolour.

In terms of the music itself, the programme is not quite as inclusive as I might have hoped. We have Vierne, Dupre and Langlais, but where are Guilmant and Widor? And, bearing in mind Cantrill's enthusiastic note on Messiaen in his excellent booklet essay, a piece by this composer would not have been amiss.

But I'm quibbling. Cantrill is a formidable musician, and his feeling for timbre and texture makes the CD just so inviting, and nowhere more so than in the most substantial offering - the first of Cesar Franck's Chorals. This is a sprawling wonder, slipping and sliding its way through what could easily have become a chromatic Sargasso Sea. It's the rhythmic flexibility of the playing combined with Cantrill's savoir-faire with the stops that make it a buoyant 17 minutes. There's a lighter side too, in amongst stained glass windows and incense. Vierne's Carillon de Westminster has fun with Big Ben's chimes and Lefebure-Wely's Sortie is a manic circus polka, carousel chromatics and all.

As always with Trust releases, the presentation is elegantissimo - they've found a Gordon Walters gouache that looks remarkably like a keyboard and have also made room for a John Drawbridge etching of St Andre, Artois, to secure a French connection. Along with Cantrill's solid essay on French organ music there's a full list of the Wellington Cathedral organ stops from Gedackt and Rohr Flute to Sequencer. What a shame there isn't some information on how the instrument was modified before its 1992 renovation.

Finally, one of the many advantages of a local recording is that Aucklanders will have the opportunity to hear Cantrill in person when he gives a recital in St Andrews Church, 2A Symonds St, on October 15 at 1.05pm. Take along a croissant lunch.

* Andrew Cantrill, Fete: French Organ Music from the Wellington Cathedral of St Paul (Trust MMT 2032)