Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2022 i Choir & Organ

THE CANADIAN INTERNATIONAL ORGAN COMPETITION (CIOC) presents its annual Grand Organ Festival throughout the month of October in Montreal. The Festival coincides with the start of Mary-Beth Campbell’s tenure as executive director. A dozen activities are planned at various locations across the city over the weekend of 20-23 October. On 20 October at 7pm, Isabelle Demers plays her own transcription of three movements from Stravinsky’s Petrushka at Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste (Casavant Frères Opus 615, 1915/1996) alongside Canadian composer Rachel Laurin’s Thème sur des Variations and works by J.S. Bach, William Albright and César Franck. Later that evening, at 9.30pm at the same venue, six organists play new organ works by local composers Maurice-Gaston Du Berger, Adrian Foster, Nicholas Gagnon-Choy, Laurence Jobidon, Joel Peters and Louis-Michel Tougas. On 21 October at 7pm,…

CHOIR OF THE EARTH has launched an international Come and Sing Messiah tour. The tour starts in London on 22 October. Choir of the Earth began life as The Self-Isolation Choir, formed in response to the global impact of the coronavirus. In March 2020, 3,500 singers from around the world joined ‘Messiah at Home’; the choir has since grown to 7,000 members. With the choir still thriving past its second anniversary, founder Mark Strachan and musical director Ben England have responded to calls for an in-person event. Aware that organising a single event in a central location would prohibit travel for many and that the associated carbon footprint would be environmentally damaging, Strachan and England have chosen to bring Messiah on tour, with a small team of locally engaged singers…

THE LONGWOOD GARDENS INTERNATIONAL ORGAN COMPETITION is now receiving applications for the 2023 edition, the fourth since it was launched in 2013 to help nurture the next generation of organists. Up-and-coming organists will compete on the 1930 Longwood Aeolian Opus 1726 Organ for a US$40,000 first prize, the largest cash prize of any organ competition in the world. Preliminary and final rounds will take place on 20-24 June 2023 in the ballroom at Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Open to ages 18-30, only the first 60 applicants will be accepted. The application deadline is 6 November 2022. The competition will begin with a qualification round where the audition jury will anonymously evaluate the competitors’ recordings of contrasting pieces with a focus on technical virtuosity, lyric sensitivity and shaping, and nuanced…

MARTIN HOW (1931-2022) Martin How, long-time staff member of the Royal School of Church Music (RSCM), has died aged 91. How spent much of his working life with the RSCM when it was based at Addington Palace. After leaving Clare College, Cambridge, where he was organ scholar, How served two years’ National Service in the Royal Army Service Corps. He then worked for the RSCM at Addington Palace, where he was choirmaster for the students and the three boys’ choirs. How returned to Cambridge in 1960 to complete his degree, with a year studying Theology. He returned to the RSCM in 1964 as Headquarters Commissioner following a three-year stint as choirmaster at Grimsby Parish Church. In 1971, How was appointed commissioner for the South, a role he kept through to…

Following his tenure at the Sacré-Cœur in Paris from 1963 to 1985, Daniel Roth became titular organist of the famous 1862 Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint-Sulpice, succeeding Charles-Marie Widor, Marcel Dupré and Jean-Jacques Grunenwald. Admired worldwide as one of the great representatives of the French organ school, he remains very active, performing, composing and giving recitals and masterclasses internationally. I ask about his early childhood. What prompted Roth to study the organ? ‘I would spend all my time drawing and I attended the Art School in Mulhouse. When I was around 10 my father bought a piano. I took lessons with a very aged, boring teacher, and I did not take to it at all. What triggered everything was the film on [Albert] Schweitzer, Il est minuit, Docteur Schweitzer (1952) by…

The world has lived for many decades with countless varieties of electronic instruments, as well as pipe organs. You can find all the descriptions of them using Wikipedia on the internet. Many early electronic instruments, which in some ways were experimental, filled a niche in the burgeoning entertainment market. It must not be forgotten that the pre-Christian organ was devised for amusement and thus the organs of the fairgrounds, Belgium’s dance halls, Amsterdam’s streets and cinemas worldwide are perhaps the proper direct descendants of those original portable musical devices. Thus, electronic organs, and more recently the digital development of them, are in the vanguard of simulated sound production. It comes as no surprise to me that, like the early instruments that found their way into the Church, our present-day situation…

When John Casken sits at his desk, he can look out across the Glendale Valley to the moorland hamlet of Doddington. It is perched on the wooded escarpment of Dod Law, rich with ancient settlements, stone circles and cup-and-ring-marked rocks. On a clear day the Lammermuir Hills are visible, over the border in Scotland. To his left are the Cheviots, with Humbleton Hill closest to hand just three miles away; it was the site of a famous English victory over the Scots in 1402, described in the first scene of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1. But this beautiful, windswept area has more peaceful associations too. St Cuthbert’s Way from Melrose, where the saint started his religious life, passes over Humbleton and through the town of Wooler en route to his…

THE ROYAL SCHOOL OF CHURCH MUSIC (RSCM), in partnership with The Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust and the publishers of the Revised English Hymnal, is promoting a special initiative – ‘In Every Corner Sing’ – to celebrate Ralph Vaughan Williams’s contribution to church music in his 150th anniversary year. The RSCM has put out an open invitation to churches and other venues to include hymn tunes and choral music by Vaughan Williams in services and communal events 8-15 October. Choirs can register their events, download both a media toolkit – including templated promotional material – and a hymn resource pack at bit.ly/3QzjZDS. Participants are encouraged to use the hashtag #RVWSing150 on social media. rscm.org.uk THE THREE CHOIRS FESTIVAL IS coordinating various events throughout October in celebration of the composer’s anniversary. At…

THE GENESIS FOUNDATION is to present ‘A Garland for a Queen’ in honour of Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. The event will take place on 11 October 2022 at the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula, Tower of London. The hour-long concert by The Sixteen, curated and conducted by the group’s founder Harry Christophers, will be performed in front of an invited audience and live-streamed globally on Classic FM’s Facebook page. The programme is built around selections from books of choral music assembled for both Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II: Cantiones Sacrae (1575); The Triumphs of Oriana (1601); A Garland for the Queen (1953), and Choirbook for the Queen (2012). The concert will also include the Foundation’s 30th commission of contemporary sacred choral music since 1998: O Lord, make…

David Hill: What’s your favourite beverage? Jeffrey Douma: That’s an easy one for me – it would have to be coffee. I’m not without it as we’re speaking. Of course, I do enjoy a glass of red wine, and other things, but ultimately it’s coffee which I can’t do without! DH: Do you cook? JD: I really enjoyed cooking: apart from musical things, it’s probably my principal hobby. It’s the way I most enjoy unwinding at the end of a long day. Just getting into the kitchen and chopping some vegetables, getting things on the stove when I have time, is such fun. I enjoy all kinds of food but probably the cuisine I could eat every day is Italian. I particularly enjoy making a risotto or carbonara – anything…

Choral and organ music from Poland will fill the London church of St Martin-in-the Fields in November, as three well-known English choirs explore some of the rich repertoire of sacred music written by Polish composers over the last thousand years or so. This is the second such festival to be held at St Martin’s, sponsored by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute; but as the festival’s artistic director, composer and conductor Paweł Łukaszewski, explains, the ravages of the Covid epidemic meant that he couldn’t be sure that last year’s event would go ahead until the very last minute. This year the festival seems to be on safer ground, and although the hope is that it will grow as the years progress, the 2022 performances give a fascinating sketch of an area of…

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I lived in Framlingham, Suffolk, for over 20 years. The church there has a fine Baroque organ – a Thamar from 1674, one of only eight large-scale organs to survive the English civil war. In my formative years, the church had a thriving robed choir of children and adults. The musical environment inspired me to start playing the organ and help with choir training, eventually leading to my appointment as organist. That’s how I ended up teaching Ed and Matt Sheeran! I studied organ with James Parsons, a great role model. The director of music at Thomas Mills High School, Richard Hanley, whose teaching ethos I’ve tried to mirror, inspired me to continue studying music at degree level. While at Sheffield University, I was organ scholar at St John’s, Ranmoor,…

CAMBRIDGE ACADEMY OF ORGAN STUDIES is to present a special event to mark the 350th anniversary of the birth of French Baroque composer Nicolas de Grigny (1672-1703). The composer’s reputation stems from one solitary publication, his Premier livre d’orgue (1699), comprising a Mass and five hymn suites – a total of 43 pieces. The event, on 29 October, will have two main components. From 1.15-2.45pm, eight Cambridge organ scholars and French Baroque specialist Dr David Ponsford will perform the Organ Mass in Trinity College Chapel, with alternatim plainchant sung by a choir directed by Matthew Martin. From 3.30-5.30pm, Dr Edward Higginbottom and Dr Ponsford will hold a symposium in the Senior Parlour at Gonville & Caius College, during which the problems associated with Grigny’s Livre d’orgue will be discussed and…

THE ENGLISH CHAMBER CHOIR CELEBRATES its 50th anniversary this year with a concert on 24 October in Cadogan Hall, London. The Choir will be joined by the English Players under the baton of artistic director Guy Protheroe, performing J.S. Bach’s Magnificat and Handel’s virtuosic Dixit Dominus. The ECC was formed in 1972 as an offshoot of the then London Symphony Orchestra Chorus; its first chorus master was Andrew Parrott, followed a few months later by Protheroe, whose own wide-ranging musical experiences shaped how it has developed. He told C&O: ‘One of the distinguishing features of the ECC over the years has been its ability to straddle the worlds of both classical and commercial music … I hope what I have brought to the Choir is my own eclectic enthusiasm for…

Don’t expect statues of generals or politicians in Oslo. There’s a huge amount of public sculpture everywhere – on street corners, in squares and particularly in parks – but it’s not there to lionise the lofty. Instead, it celebrates the ordinary people, particularly the Norwegian family. Children feature over and over again, cradled by parents, chasing balls, running in the sunshine, whispering together in excited groups. The message is plain: these small people are precious. They are the nation’s future. That philosophy reaches its apotheosis in Frogner Park, where the sculptor Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943) created a landscape peopled by hundreds of parents and children, sculpted in bronze, granite and cast iron. It’s an astonishing sight. They tumble over one another in their glee, or squirm up totem-like structures; they teeter…

It’s a baking hot Thursday morning in June and I’m drinking coffee in an organ builder’s workshop in the heart of the so-called ‘organ garden of Europe’, the Dutch province of Groningen. But, although the surrounding villages are home to a truly dazzling collection of organs, many belonging to the Schnitger dynasty, the organ we’re poring over was built by the Bevington firm in the 1850s for the Paisley home of industrialist and philanthropist Peter (later Sir Peter) Coats. In 1896, the Glasgow firm of Mirrlees moved it to the church in Bishopton, where it served until fairly recently. Indeed, all the organs around us, by Bevington, John Nicholson and Gray and Davison, are 19th-century British products. For some 35 years organ builder Fokke-Rinke Feenstra, following on from the pioneering…

part 7 The Hook organ in the Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche, Kreuzberg In the mid-19th century, Carl August Buchholz (see C&O Dec 2021, p.18ff) was the pre-eminent organ builder in Berlin and part of an organ-building tradition to some extent carried forward in the work of the firm Gebr. Dinse – one of whose instruments (II/15 with mechanical cone chests) is today housed in the Universität der Künste. Indigenous organ builders could not, however, keep up with demand that was a result of an increase in church building in Berlin around the turn of the 20th century. This opened the door to firms from further afield, such as Sauer and Steinmeyer (as documented in my previous two articles). However, very few instruments emerged from the second world war unscathed and a great deal…

FREE CD This Official 150th Anniversary Publication includes: ■ Exclusive CD with 26 tracks of recommended recordings ■ In-depth features on the man and his music ■ Reflections from leading interpreters ■ Listening guide to key recordings ■ Foreword by Sir Andrew Davis CBE On your free CD The accompanying 26-track CD traces Vaughan Williams’s career from student work in 1891 to late pieces written before his death in 1958, including many works that have been recorded for the first time during the last 15 years. The disc includes tracks from Songs of Travel, Bushes and Briars, The Lake in the Mountains and Hugh the Drover. A 150th anniversary celebration Order your copy for £14.99 (including free P&P for UK orders) Visit www.magsubscriptions.com/vaughan-williams Call: 0800 137201 (UK) or +44 (0)1722…

GABRIELI CONSORT Paul McCreesh talks candidly about educational apartheid, and wonders whether we should stop performing Bach. ST MARY’S, PORTSEA In 1892, J.W. Walker & Sons built a trail-blazing organ at this church. We document its historic restoration by Nicholson & Co. JEAN MOUTON He may not be as well known as his near contemporary Josquin, but should this French composer inspire similar respect? BAROQUE RESTORED Chris Bragg visits the Dutch town of Wijk bij Duurstede to view a 1631 Kiespenning organ retuned in ¼ comma meantone. CITY OF LONDON CHOIR The choir is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, but most of its members are half that age. Plus… International news and previews, specialist reviews, regular columns, and a supplement of Early Music Festivals.…