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Nick Bennett

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Everything posted by Nick Bennett

  1. Not to mention "Leather Lips"
  2. What on earth was going on at the end of the middle section of the Bach in Thomas Trotter's recital? To my ears it was utterly ruined by being played on a registration with far too much quint tone. The final chord had strong sevenths and ninths in it, and sounded like Ravel. However, I've heard on another forum every view from "it sounded fine to me" to "OMG what a disaster". What did people on here think?
  3. And it has been announced on Peterborough Cathedral's web site: http://www.peterborough-cathedral.org.uk/news-archive/items/Robert_Quinney_post.html.
  4. Paying the janitor is quite an issue. At a certain town hall in the north of England, there is a fine organ. If there is something else going on, getting access to it on a Saturday is no problem. However, if they have to open the building specially for you, they have to pay not one person but two, because there is a union agreement that nobody should be in the building alone - and I can see why. Furthermore, there is another agreement that once somebody has been called out to work, they are paid for a full 8 hour shift. In fact, because it's a Saturday, they get time and a half. Hence it costs the council several hundred pounds just to unlock the door.
  5. Why? Are the other employees going to be so upset by this appointment that its announcement needs careful management? I agree that it shouldn't be announced by a third party, but surely it's his news as much as it's his employer's, and he is as entitled to make an announcement as they are.
  6. I remember purchasing the Ledger LP and playing it to a friend without telling him what it was. We both went to the Saturday recitals most weeks so knew the sound of the instrument in the chapel pretty well. He could not believe me when I told him it was King's. And I could see why. The instrument never sounded anywhere near that bright from the stalls. I think we both considered it to be a rather fraudulent recording!
  7. It's hardly libellous to announce that an organist has got a job as organist at a London church. Get a sense of proportion guys.
  8. Another case of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story.
  9. But not every coupler does put a mechanism between the player and the key does it? What about shove couplers?
  10. The only piece that came off at all well was the A major P+F. But even then, I've heard better performances of it from teenagers preparing for grade 8. Everything else was a joke.
  11. Undemanding in the aesthetic sense, yes. Beethoven didn't push the boundaries of the piano by making arrangements of Stamitz sinfoniae for it, nor Berlioz the orchestra by arranging Buxtehude viola da gamba sonatas for it. Their pushing made the piano more pianistic and the orchestra more orchestral. What is happening with the organ, especially in the UK, is making it less and less echt and returning it to its erstwhile role of being a pale imitation of something rather more interesting. There are composers pushing the boundaries of the organ, but the likes of Carlo Curley and Cameron Carpenter aren't playing their works.
  12. I honestly do not want a charismatic performer playing a charismatic programme. I am perfectly happy with good music played stylishly and well, whether it is Sweelinck or MacMillan. I am certainly not impressed by or even interested in organists having a "big personality" and more than I want my plumber to have one. Nor do I want to hear a load of arrangements of rather undemanding music I could perfectly easily hear in the far more satisfactory form that the composer intended played by a "look how clever I am" organist. So often I find myself siding with Dr Johnson - "difficult do you call it? I wish it were impossible!" I have largely given up going to organ recitals because there is so little organ music played these days. [iconoclasm] I would happily throw organs on the bonfire if they have become an end in themselves rather than a means of transmitting the repertoire. Let future generations discover the repertoire and start building organs capable of playing it. [/iconoclasm]
  13. Or for the more rotund among us, Unda Pants 16
  14. Respect? As far as I can tell from the musicians I know he is drawing scorn and derision on organists.
  15. I trust she employed the Schartz-Metterklume method.
  16. One of the doctors from the Kilmeny surgery by any chance?
  17. Wayne Marshall presented Naji Hakim with the lugubrious theme music from Coronation Street at the Bridgewater Hall. He was only given the first phrase and, of course, he didn't know how it continued. He clearly wasn't impressed and made a comment to that effect. Some of the St Albans themes have been so chromatic as to be completely unmemorable. Maybe the judges were able to pick them out, but most of the audience couldn't.
  18. Isn't it just? Perhaps his father introduced him to some non-French repertoire.
  19. Hmm ... not as easy as that is it? Select "Classical" then you'll find Max Reger's Chorale Fantasia on "Ein' Feste Burg" played by Leonard Sanderman on the new Tickell at Keble as part of a live broadcast of Choral Evensong. It's available for another three weeks.
  20. This made the hair on the back of my neck stand up: http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/showcase/genres/classical#/clips/p00rdjbr/in/collection/p00b9xn8
  21. What is likely to be heard will be completely at odds with the spirit of the composer if his execrable performances on YouTube are anything to go by. And then Wayne Marshall playing BWV 565 so fast the pipes don't have time to speak. Groan!
  22. After too long in the pub after a lunchtime recital we might become a chamade of organists.
  23. Interesting programme! I see the Senior Organ Scholar at Keble is also called Sanderman - I take it there is a connection?
  24. I couldn't work out how they managed to finish together, given the absolute shambles that was in progress during the penultimate line! I often think congregations have a better idea what speed the hymns go at in a particular building than the organists do.
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