'Pink and white' but not coconut ice

When I first heard that Martin Setchell, high priest of the Organ Bonbon, was releasing a CD titled Pink and White, I assumed it might have something to do with coconut ice.

I was wrong. The album is a collection of New Zealand organ music, its title taken from a Anthony Ritchie piece that recreates the 1886 Tarawera eruption. The CD cover features the celebrated Hoyte watercolour of the Pink and White Terraces.

Setchell is on home ground at the Christchurch Town Hall's Rieger organ, and producer Wayne Laird has created an ambience to bask in. And, believe me, the Gothique thunderings of Ritchie's Pink and White are spine-shivering.

There is more local music for the New Zealand organist than you might think. Setchell has chosen eight samplings written over the past 60 years, from Lilburn's 1944 Prelude and Fugue in G minor to recent works by Jack Body and Tecwyn Evans, rounding it all off with a jolly, if old-fashioned, ramble on Pokarekare Ana composed by the organist himself.

The Lilburn is a minor classic and the composer's "serene flow" is caught with ease. Setchell's articulation in the pastoral fugue is particularly sensitive, a feature which, along with perfectly considered registration, makes for the utmost clarity in David Farquhar's From Heaven I Come. Setchell revels in the pageantry of John Ritchie's Let the pealing organ blow and the mercurial colour play of Douglas Mews' Prelude and Fugue, a timely reminder of the late composer's enviable fluency. I am imagining how Mews' brow might crease and his bushy eyebrows furrow if he could read my words suggesting that some Bernard Herrmann harmonies are possibly lurking in his Prelude.

Though both Anthony Ritchie and Tecwyn Evans, in his prowling Gerauschvoll, cater for the grander capabilities of the Rieger instrument, Body's Tui, korimako and kokako is a fragile wonder - to paraphrase Hildegard, "a feather on the breath of Tane Mahuta". It is not quite South Pacific Messiaen, as the composer uses actual birdsong recordings among the organ sonorities, but I couldn't imagine a more perfect evocation of that eternal duet between man and nature, functioning so beautifully as both celebration and warning.

* Martin Setchell Pink and White, (Atoll ACD 605)