Bat squeaks and red herrings

Blue Gadoo is one of those cats whose face looks like it’s been bashed flat with a wok. He lives in New York, apparently, and his bulging eyes goggle out from Gerald Barry’s programme note for his new Organ Concerto. Check him out: the Guardian published the full note a day before the performance, which is only right because a Gerald Barry world première really ought to be national news. ‘I saw a photograph of him with a book called Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde,’ explains Barry. ‘By his expression I knew he was mourning the loss of atonality.’

There’s heaps more like that. Some of it offers a genuine insight into Barry’s new concerto — his boyhood experiences with a wheezing church harmonium in rural County Clare, embodied here in a harrumphing harmonium solo; and the way the chime of the Angelus would silence the daily routine just as it opens out a sudden, pregnant gap in the centre of the music.