Clavecin

That brings back memories. I was brought up in Burnley and took up my first organist's appointment in the mid 60s at the age of 12, the organ, a Driver & Co. 2 manual 8/9/2 if I remember correctly, now long gone. A typical late Victorian work horse, I remember a couple of other Drivers in the Burnley area but most organs I came across were Laycock & Bannister and a few Conachers. There were very many nonconformist churches back then, some of them very large, but the rot was setting in with many closing by the mid 60s. There was a 3m Driver in Haggate Baptist Church which I'm sure went abroad, I think it was Driver's largest instrument but would have dated from the turn of the century, not the 1920s. I never heard or played it but remember seeing the motorised feeders which provided the wind in the room beneath the organ. Could be the one! There was a West Yorkshire firm called Driver & Haigh who were active in the period between the wars, I think the Burnley firm would have been wound up then

I would have thought that this list covers it, I've yet to visit the Nancy area so was not aware of this one. The A.C-C in Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste Perpignan has a remarkable acoustic 32' flue called Quintaton 32'. It has real drive, too loud under quite combinations but ok from say mf with manual doubles up to full organ. It's one of those effects which appears to grow in intensity as the general sound level increases, with the big reeds on you would swear that you could hear a 32' reed. I regret not asking the organist who looked after us to explain exactly what goes on with this stop. I'm sure that A.C-C was bound by lack of space in many of his most prestigious builds as he was obliged to retain the classical casework, usually retaining also a Positif de Dos, from instruments of the previous century or earlier. Instruments which were very much smaller usually with a pedal organ which would only feature Open Flutes and Trompettes at 8&4' pitches. Hence so few examples of genuine 32' registers.

The 1880 Cavaillé-Coll in Cathédrale Sainte-Croix Orléans has an acoustic/resultant Contre-Bombarde 32'. The 32' drawstop also draws the Bombarde 16' drawstop, it actually plays an independent 10 2/3 Bombard rank throughout it's compass. The Cathedral is one of France's big ones with a very long reverberation time, the organ sounds absolutely fabulous, the 32' puts a decent growl under full organ but isn't a 'floor shaker' like the real thing at Basilique Saint-Sernin Toulouse. Speaking of which, the 1889 Cavaillé-Coll at St Sernin has a similar acoustic/resultant Principal-basse 32' which also draws the Contrebasse 16' and plays a Quint throughout it's compass - no use under celestes! True 32's flue and reed stops in A.C-C organs are surprisingly rare beasts. Played at Evreux several years ago, thought the 32' was the real thing at the time.

I learned both Dupre Cortege et Litanie, and Duruflé Veni Creator Variations on a 30 note pedalboard, in the Dupre I take the top g down an octave. I've never had regular access to an organ with a 32 note pedal, but the organ in the church were I've now been organist for several years does have a 32 note pedal. However, I still take the top g down an octave, as it's quite a tricky passage and having thoroughly learned the music one way my brain won't cope with doing it another way. In the Duruflé it's much easier to play the top f#s thus avoiding the awkward thumbing down in the 30 note version.

Agreed, wouldn't go with this one. There are quite a few errors of accidental placement which I've marked in my copy where there is a discrepancy between identical right and left hand chords. When I looked up your example I found yet another, the 3rd RH chord in the bar you refer to. She's obviously referring to this chord, not the 2nd. There are similar printing errors in Litanies

I do the 'digital' version of photocopying, cutting and gluing. I scan the music as a .jpg (a picture) then copy/paste into Microsoft Publisher. Publisher is a paid-for programme, part of Microsoft's office suite, I think it's about £70 per year for a paid-up Microsoft account and it does give you access to various other things like 1Tb cloud storage and proper support. I use Publisher for various other aspects of my church work and find it very easy to use and very useful. So, I scan a page of music, then use the basic built-in editing functions on my laptop to 'cut out' the various music systems I want and paste them into a Publisher page, they can then be moved around and resized using the tags that appear in the corners of the various boxes containing the music. I often reduce the system size at this stage to fit more systems onto a page, doing this makes the page narrower in which case I trim the printed page down accordingly, this then allows you to fit more pages onto your music desk. There is very little loss of 'sharpness' and the end results can look very professional. If I'm reducing the system size considerably I regard the final copy as a 'performing only' version and do all the learning from the original. Another way to do this would be to scan your music as a .pdf document, then use a PDF editor to do rest. However, full PDF editing software is much more expensive than Publisher.

If you're looking for a toccata, there's Diversion for Mixtures which is a perpetuum mobile type piece. It's in Novello's The Colours of the Organ album. Not sure if it's in print but I bought one s/h recently for Lloyd Webber's lovely Benedictus. Diversion was on FJ's Great Cathedral series LP. I last heard it at York at an RCO service for FJ's 100th

R&D also used metal 16ft bourdon basses in their extension organs. There's one near me in a 1960s church which has the bourdon and diapason basses in the facade, the bourdon mouths have the high cut up and curved upper lip, the scaling of the bourdon is very similar to the diapason. I used to play R&D and Walker extension organs quite a lot in my youth. As far as difference in sound quality is concerned, I think it is all down to scaling. I was the organist at a church in Merseyside with a Walker Positive for several years, it had a wooden bass to the bourdon which was pretty large scale and had a real oomph, certainly it would not make sense to make a stopped metal bass of anywhere near such scaling. H,N&B also made modern extension organs from the 1960s, as a youth I played their Heptonstall organ often which has a wooden 16ft bourdon, again with plenty of oomph.

The OBS software looks extremely comprehensive. There are a couple of churches where I occasionally play which set up a camera and projector but they've been doing this sort of thing for quite a while and use very basic equipment, which works perfectly well. I was aware that using wifi for any part of the process was likely to introduce latency, mind you, the action on our church organ is so slow that this would probably put the images and sound heard by the audience in perfect sync! There are very many people posting Youtube videos with 2 or 3 cameras running on their consoles, I'm sure they're not using expensive cameras.

My church is about to install a projector and screen system, we are still in the planning stage. I give a monthly organ recital and would like to have a couple of cameras on the console to display an image on the screen, as many churches and cathedrals do for their organ recitals. The company we're going to use for the installation are quoting silly money for 2 cameras, interfaces to a laptop and the necessary software to provide a split-screen image. I had thought that 2 basis webcams would do the job and that a standard windows laptop would already have the necessary software onboard. I've been asked to look into this and am hoping that someone who has experience of this sort of thing at their church or cathedral can offer some advice. Thanks in anticipation. Clavecin

I was very interested to see the photo of the organ as originally built, on Nicholson's website with the staircases at either side, I was unaware of this. It's well known that Alfred Waterhouse's design for the Great Hall left little room for a grand organ, the space is not really an organ chamber, more of an apse. In the original photo, the organ appears to be free standing, although I'm sure that the blower, reservoirs etc will be below stage level. If you have a look at some of the details on the specification you will see that there is actually only one full 16 foot flue stop, the pedale Contrebasse, the Grande Orgue Principal 16 has stopped pipes for the lowest 5 notes which make the longest case pipe about 12 foot. It's a very long time since I played this organ (back in my teens in the early 70's) but I seem to recall that the bottom end of the Soubasse 32 was acoustic, as swalmsley commented about A-CC 32ft reeds, true 32ft flues, open or stopped, are also quite rare beasts. I'm certainly looking forward to this organ being restored, a 32ft reed would be magnificent, but I think the right decision has been made to return the organ to its 1893 state.

That's fantastic news. Flentrop have a good track record for Cavaille-Coll reconstructions. The Philharmonie in Haarlem, just across the street from the Bavokerk has a similar sized A C-C which has a very similar history to the Manchester organ - additions, action and console changed. Flentrop restored this back to its original state in 2006. https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgel_van_de_Philharmonie_Haarlem

I think Paul Derrett bought it first time it came up for sale. He also has the ex Tewkesbury console, if remember correctly, the Doncaster console was in much better condition, but only had 58 note keyboards.

The old 5 manual Walker Console is back on eBay once again.

Just come across my David Patrick edition of this, it's published by Edwin Ashdown Ltd and a quick google shows that it is currently available. I went over to the Dupre version a few years ago when it was reissued at a more affordable price. As AJJ states, the Patrick edition is much more approachable, but like any arrangement of this piece, you can't get away from the constant semiquaver figuration in the RH some of which is a bit uncomfortable.