In this second of WASO’s Discovery Concerts, The Art of Orchestration, the dessert arrived before the main course. But not before the entrée. And what an entrée it was.

Organist Joseph Nolan’s playing is marked by a strange mixture of perfectionism and impetuosity. Whence comes its dizzying verve, its febrile intensity. So as far as curtain-raisers go, this performance of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor on the Perth Concert Hall organ was always going to be an exciting proposition.

And exciting it was, fleet fingers and feet finding – I don’t know how – time to change stops as they sped from cadence to thunderous cadence through sometimes crisply tessellated, sometimes thickly polyphonic labyrinths. The applause was equally thunderous.

A hard act to follow, you might think. But Asher Fisch knew what he was about. Plenty of time for the tension to dissipate, the pulses to slow, as he took us through conductor Leopold Stokowski’s approach to orchestrating Bach’s piece, with Nolan still on hand so passages in the original could be compared with passages in the arrangement.

Asher Fisch. Photograph courtesy of WASO

Although Fisch acknowledged the Stokowski could be seen as in...