MichaelDavidson

As luck would have it I just came across these two clips on YouTube which address this issue quite nicely. While I suspect that these two improvisations had probably been rehearsed before being recorded it does show what can be done given registrants who know the instrument and understand your style of playing.

I am afraid that the awful truth about the origins of BWV 565 has now been revealed on YouTube ... Toccata & Fugue in D minor

There are, of course, other ways of dealing with these eventualities

The instrument in Queens' is extremely effective and fits the chapel perfectly. The specification is 100% original Binns and, as far as I know, there have been absolutely no tonal changes during it's entire life. The original action was tubular pneumatic but it was electrified by Johnson's in the 1960's. The restoration by Harrisons kept the electro-pneumatic action, but they restored the console to something more like the original Binns layout, with the couplers operated by a row of draw stops under the music desk (I believe that this is what the "restored to Binns style" comment refers to) The lack of a 16' reed is rarely noticed, although I have to admit that if I could add just one stop it would be a 16' reed - probably a Contra Fagotto on the Swell duplexed to the Pedal (although from a historical perspective a 16' Pedal Trombone would be more authentic) - thankfully the college resisted all such temptations in the 2002 work and left the specification alone. Overall it is a very fine instrument - so much so, in fact, that it has always seemed to me to be somewhat uncharacteristic of most of Binns' work. I assume that a Cambridge college would have been a prestige job for Binns and probably got special attention, but I have often wondered just what factors came into play to make the whole thing come out as well as it did.

Also Queens' College, Cambridge.

The 1939 Rushworth and Dreaper in Holy Rude, Stirling, also has a Tenor Solo to Pedal. I assume that Rushworth's got the idea from the Liverpool instruments. I only know of two occasions on which it got used - once by John Rose in the early 1970's for Reger's Ein Feste Burg and once by David Briggs around 1995 ...

Rushworth's seem to have been quite fond of septiemes in the 1930's. Their 1939 job for the Church of the Holy Rude Stirling (from, I suspect, the very end of their 'very good' period) had a very similar, although somewhat larger, specification right down to the Choir septieme which, unfortunately, got transformed into a 1 1/3 sometime in the late 1970's.

... or Hindemith for that matter?

It is indeed. Thanks in no small part to lack of money and years of benign neglect Queens' is fortunate enough to still have the original instrument that was built for the new chapel in 1893. The action was electrified by Johnson's in the 1960's and the whole instrument was refurbished by Harrisons a few years ago but on both occasions the college resisted the temptation to tinker with the specification in any way. The specification is here It fits the chapel perfectly, and is ideal for it's primary purpose of accompanying Anglican church services, but you can play absolutely anything on it. The thing that astonished me most when I first played it was that it was just so damn good! Nothing at all like any of the other Binns instruments that I had encountered, most of which, unfortunately, were in very poor condition. It has that wonderful characteristic that I have heard John Mander refer to as "blend" - all of the stops have their own character and are individually beautiful but none of them is voiced in an extreme way and you can combine any stops that make sense (and quite a lot that don't) and come up with wonderful results.

John Kitchen is Edinburgh City Organist and I believe that Simon Lindley is still Leeds City Organist.

I don't pretend to understand all of the allusions here, but I can think of at least one occasion when I have seen a cathedral organist actually *playing* from a Novello Bach edition. It was Roger Fisher giving a recital in the Bute Hall of Glasgow University sometime in the early 1970's. The second or third piece was the fifth Trio Sonata and it was memorable for two reasons other than the performance. Firstly the fact that Roger Fisher stood up and removed his jacket before beginning to play - he didn't quite roll up his sleeves but I believe that he adjusted his cuffs quite carefully. Secondly, his page turner didn't realise that rather than writing out the first movement in it's entirety, the Novello edition just had a "da capo" marking requiring one to turn back a couple of pages. When the page turner completely missed the necessary turn back, Fisher reached out and turned the pages himself with enough force to produce a loud report that rang out like a rifle shot. A few years later I met Roger Fisher and he commented that while most of his repertoire only required a few weeks of work before a performance, there were two exceptions which he felt needed 6 months of solid practice - the Bach Trio Sonatas and "anything by Dupre" - I don't remember if I asked him whether those pieces also required him to remove his jacket.

Indeed he has and they are selling the t-shirt ... The entire web site Orgues en Bretagne is worth looking at.

A few favourites:: Weingarten Groote Kerk, Maassluis Oude Kerk, Amsterdam King's College, Cambridge St. Sernin, Toulouse

Or, indeed, Francis Jackson at York.

While I am sure that there are earlier examples the two that immediately come to mind are Liverpool Cathedral and the 1929 rebuild of the Alexandra Palace, both by Henry Willis III. Both these jobs had a "Solo Tenor Solo to Pedal" which I believe had the effect of coupling the Solo to the Pedal from tenor C upwards while also silencing the pedal stops on that part of the pedalboard. (This is the way that the "Tenor Solo" coupler worked on the 1939 R&D in the Church of the Holy Rude, Stirling, which I always assumed was a copy by Rushworths of what the Willis coupler did). I suspect that the motivation was probably more for playing transcriptions than for improvisation.

It is almost impossible to give any hard and fast rules - ultimately you have to be the judge of what does and doesn't "work" in terms of registration. One thing you have to realise is that you *don't* have a 17th or 18th century German organ at your disposal and trying to make it sound like one probably isn't going to be very successful. As a general rule (and there are, of course, exceptions) you won't want the sound to be too "thick" or "heavy" so that probably means being economical in the number of stops that you draw. Frequently "less is more" - you could quite effectively practice (and even perform) the Buxtehude F# minor on 8' + 4' on the manuals coupled through to the most appropriate 16' that you have on the pedals - start with something like that and work from there. You can also experiment with playing stops either up or down an octave from their normal picth either by judicious use of octave and unison off couplers or by just playing up an octave on the keyboards. Listen to the sound critically and see if it works. Sometimes drawing the manual doubles and playing up an octave can be very effective (but sometimes it can sound really awful)

I think that the original question is impossible to answer. But ... if you asked me which of JSB's organ works I simply could not bear to be without, then it would have to be the A minor P&F BWV 543.

The Church's One Foundation (Aurelia)

I don't have an answer for you, but someone who might is Ken List who was, I believe, with Phelps and Associates pretty much right until the end. Ken can usually be found lurking on the PIPORG-L mailing list. The archives of PIPORG-L can be found here and you can subscribe to the list itself using the web interface here.

If you are looking for English composers from that period you could do worse than to pull out a copy of "A Little Organ Book in Memory of Hubert Parry" which was (I think) published in 1924, about 6 years after Parry's death. In it you will find Parry himself, Stanford, Herbert Brewer, Alan Gray, Charles Macpherson, Ivor Atkins, Frank Bridge, Harold Darke, Charles Wood, Walter Alcock, GTB, Henry Ley and Walford Davies. Not all great music by any means but it definitely evokes that era.

Yes! While I have to agree that much of R&D's work was, at best, uninspired they did occasionally come up with something really good. I am thinking of the 4m 82 stop R&D in the Church of the Holy Rude, Stirling. Built in 1939 it is typical of the period - unashamedly romantic but capable of playing anything. Very little has been changed since then - the Great Octave Quint was moved up an octave to 1 1/3' pitch and the Choir mutations and mixture were rearranged slightly, but other than that it is tonally still in pretty much original condition despite a rebuild in 1990 which was necessitated by water damage caused by a leaking roof. The Choir organ was buried below impost level in the case and was thus much less effective than it might have been, but otherwise it was (and is) a superb instrument. I must admit that there were some minor details of the 1990 work with which I was less than happy - the original piston system had double touch pistons to Great, Swell, and Choir each with it's own pedal combination on the second touch - for some reason the wonderful new solid state system couldn't handle this so the second touch was removed. The original console had a very nice system which allowed you to assign the Swell, Choir and Solo shutters to any of the three swell pedals - this consisted of three horizontal lever switches, arranged above each other - the Solo switch was at the top, with the Swell and Choir swtches below it and you just moved the switch to the left, centre or right position to select which swell pedal controlled that division. Rather than reuse the existing switches, Rushworths put in a little panel with three rotary switches on it that look as if they came off a cheap transistor radio - quite apart from the fact that they look horrible it's impossible to remember which one does what because they are now laid out horizontally. ...but those are minor complaints - it still sounds wonderful (and it also has one of the most "comfortable" consoles that I have ever encountered - it was extremely easy to play)