MichaelDavidson

Matteo Imbruno has recently put up several very good quality recordings which can be found here.

"prominent names" indeed ... George Oldroyd, G. D. Cunningham and Arnold Richardson certainly all qualify, but the one that stood out particularly for me was Reginald Goodall. I had no idea that he had been a church musician earlier in his career.

Yes, but that was 30 years or so ago and (at least on those occasions) Rawsthorne didn't "do" encores ...

Yes - it is Martin Mans making a lot of noise on the Van den Heuvel at St Eustache ...

I am pretty sure that has been posted before but I think that it bears repeating ...

While you didn't name names I am betting that (amazingly enough, considering the acoustics at Liverpool) both Noel Rawsthorne and Ian Tracey are right up there at the head of the pack ... I have heard Rawsthorne play this live at Liverpool on more than one occasion and the overall effect was always a glorious blur of sound - not at all unpleasant but it would have been nice to hear a few more of the notes ...

From the close-up view in the second picture it appears to be a set of small bells which, rather than being attached to a rotating wheel are rung individually by some mechanism. Presumably that is where the "electronics" come in.

I only heard the old instrument once - at a lunchtime recital given sometime in the Lent term of 1975 - which was, I believe, the very last recital given before it was dismantled. I don't remember much about the recital except that the organ sounded in pretty good shape and did everything that you would expect a large Harrison of that vintage to do and did it well. Not sure who was playing - might have been Richard Marlow or one of the organ scholars (for some reason I seem to think that Trinity had two organ scholars that year, but I may be wrong). One thing that I do remember is that the "chaire" case which, I think, contained the positive organ (3 ranks attributed to Father Smith) had already been dismantled and the pipework removed - all that was left was the empty wind chest protruding from the edge of the screen.

Must have been Georg Felix Handel Bartholdy ...

Well apparently there is at least one more which thankfully focuses almost entirely on Dupre at the console instead of wandering around the interior of St Sulpice.

Actually I rather like the Flentrop in Dunblane Cathedral The new case is essentially a deeper version of the old one by Robert Lorimer which was really just a facade for the entrance to the chamber in which the previous instrument was buried.

Olivier Latry having fun at Notre Dame Warning - the camera work is pretty terrible and in places made me feel quite seasick ...

Indeed - but fortunately not even the purists suggest that you have to play *all* of the stuff in between in order to be able to play both the prelude and the fugue in the same recital ...

I don't think that this actually beats Haarlem but it, too, is in a league of its own ...

On the contrary I think that he had thought about it very carefully - but he was approaching it with a perspective that is very hard for us to understand. This was recorded over 50 years ago when RVW was towards the end of his life - his formative years were at the end of the 19th century - over 100 years ago. Most of the principles that he espoused are similar to ones that I see often in these message boards - it is the music that matters - use your ears - use good musical judgment - don't slavishly follow the registration in the score if it doesn't sound right ... etc ... etc ... RVW's point is one that has often been made - we can never know exactly what a contemporary performance of Bach's music would have sounded like and even if we *could* know that we could still only hear it through our 21st century ears that have become accustomed to a whole range of sounds that simply didn't exist in Bach's day. Of course, then you have the problem of what to do about it - the current fashion is to try to understand what we can about the historical context in which this music was first performed and then attempt a "historically informed" performance - but, at the end of the day, let's admit that there is still a lot of conjecture (which is just a fancy word for guess-work) and I think that the more successful "historically informed" performances owe as much to present day good taste and musicianship on the part of the editors and performers as they do to historical research. Put another way - we are never going to know the whole picture - research can give us some ideas of how certain things might have been - it can give us some pieced of the jig saw puzzle - but much more is still unknown than is known so it is still down to a modern interpretation to "fill in the blanks" and put those pieces together into something that is musically convincing. If RVW appeared to be particularly cavalier in his approach I think it is just because he was being honest and plain spoken about what he believed. Certainly one thing continues to be true - each generation has an absolutely unshakable certainty that they and they alone have been granted the wisdom to truly understand how things should be done, and how utterly wrong their immediate predecessors were ...

Spoke too soon ... I think that this is it ... ... and this translation by Google might help a little ...

Not sure - I believe that, despite being described as an improvisation, it is actually: Sinfonia on “Geprezen zij de Heer” by Jan Mulder (or, at least, heavily based on that piece) As far as I can tell it does not appear to be in print.

Something along these lines might be fun ...

.

How about the Ives "Variations on America"? ... if nothing else, you can be sure that the audience will know the tune ...

Roger Fisher once told me that it normally took him two or three weeks to get a piece that was already in his repertoire worked up to what he regarded as recital standard. There were, however, two major exceptions to this general rule - the Bach trio sonatas and anything by Dupre - he said that he was not comfortable programming anything in those categories for a recital without 6 months notice. (and this, of course, from someone who could actually play any of those pieces at the drop of a hat) There are actually very few recitalists who dare to play the trio sonatas in public and even fewer who will play them on anything but an instrument with which they are very familiar. It isn't so much that they are fiendishly technically difficult - they aren't - but that you simply have to get absolutely every note right every time no matter what - you can make quite spectacular mistakes in a Bach fugue and recover from it and most of the audience won't even notice - not so with one of the trio sonatas - it's a bit like doing a tightrope act without a safety net.

There is more ,,, Although not identified in the YouTube clips, I believe that this is Karen Christianson. Definitely someone to watch out for.

Try instead ...

I have very fond memories of Dennis Townhill and his playing. In the 1970's, back when I was a teenager, St Mary's Cathedral had a fairly active program of recitals and I went to many of them. He did the complete Bach works at least twice during the 1970's as a series of thirteen (I think) one hour recitals during the Edinburgh festival - I think that I got to about half of them and wished that I could have heard them all. I knew that he had done Franck as well, although I don't recall being at any of that series. Although he was a very good performer I always suspected that he suffered from a little bit of "stage fright" at recitals, although it never came across in his playing. I remember that there was a very definite ritual that he went through. About ten minutes before the start of the recital someone, usually his assistant, would set up the console for him - lights and blower on, music on the music desk open at the first piece and the appropriate stops drawn. At the appointed hour, Townhill would come out front and say a few words of welcome to the audience - he then turned and walked briskly back to the console, got on the bench and started to play immediately. One other random memory - I remember him playing "Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich hiermit" in memory of Brian Runnett at the end of a recital that he happened to be giving a few days after Runnett died in a car crash.

I was disappointed that it didn't also come with: "No Clergy? No Problem! 1 and 2" "No Congregation? No Problem!" Looking around on the Mayhew web site I also came across Essential Wedding Music for Manuals which claims to be "A player-friendly collection for manuals which contains all the most-requested pieces" including, apparently, "Toccata from Symphony No. 5 - Widor". I just can't imagine what that must be like ...