WHEN Bernhard Gfrerer is drawing the stops,there is little doubt the organ is the king of instruments. In a thoroughly appropriate genuflection to his own Salzburg origins, Gfrerer opened his otherwise German and French programme with Mozart's Fantasia in F minor (K594).
As if unable to resist the temptation, Gfrerer employed almost immediately the splendid regal en chamade reeds of the Concert Hall organ.
These horizontal pipes are highly prized by organists and audiences throughout the world and no one could have cared that they would never have been heard in Mozart's Salzburg.
Indeed the choice of such a bombastic registration for the central contrapuntal allegro turned it into more of a Bacchanalian totentanz than Mozart's patron Count Josef Daym could possibly have imagined.
With the dramatic full organ introduction to Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G minor (BMW 542), Gfrerer plunged into the fire and brimstone which is the ultimate trial of any organist's mettle. His full-blooded declamation of the Fifth Evangelist's huge rhetorical gestures seemed more Romantic than Baroque.
And his liberal use of the swell box and cloying legato lent more towards the tastes of the earlier, rather than the later, 20th century. The furious pace of the fugue, on the other hand, seemed calculated to try the steely nerves of even the most secure formula one veteran.