Colin Pykett
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Posts posted by Colin Pykett
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I have two of the recordings mentioned above - Roger Fisher at Chester (Motette CD-11501) and Carlo Curley at St Mary Redcliffe (Argo 433 450-2) - and have just spent an enjoyable afternoon renewing my acquaintance with both of them.
Both were recorded in 1991, which in the case of Redcliffe means the organ was fresh from its 1990 restoration. Both recordings come across with a broadly similar sound palette, which is perhaps a little surprising given the different pedigrees of the two instruments (Chester - Whiteley, Gray & Davison, Hill, Rushworth & Dreaper - versus Redcliffe - Harrison & Harrison). Both are distantly miked, excessively so I would say for the delicate sound tapestries which are a hallmark of this work - far too much of both is lost in the swirl of the acoustic. Thus you really need the score open to follow what is going on unless you are familiar in detail with the work. Both recordings are virtually the same length at 26 minutes give or take a few seconds. Fisher played from the Elgar Complete edition; Curley does not say. But he (and it was he himself who wrote the sleeve notes) falls massively into the trap of believing that the work was commissioned for the inauguration of the Hope-Jones organ!! Oh dear.
To my mind Roger Fisher plays it pretty 'straight' compared to Carlo, who employs more rubato and exaggerates (over-exaggerates?) the differences between his legato and staccato. His performance has more swagger, but some of his chords are so detached as to be almost completely lost - quite apart from the acoustic, I wondered whether the pipes actually had time to speak properly in some cases.
In his first movement Curley seems to interrupt the music noticeably at one or two points almost as though he was searching for the right piston, though this might have been deliberate phrasing. In Fisher's second movement the quiet accompaniment to the melody is just too quiet - one cannot hear it properly. Curley's rendition does not have this problem, though he takes it and the third movement significantly more slowly. By contrast his final movement is far, far too fast and it is here where one simply loses many of the notes which Elgar painstakingly wrote for us.
Which do I prefer? Actually I'm very content to have both, though if I had to dispose of one it would be Carlo's I'm afraid. There's just too much of the performer there, rather than the composer. But this is merely my opinion and others might disagree, especially as Carlo is no longer with us. His disc serves as a fitting memorial to him in many ways.
CEP
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Possibly a bit over your hour's journey time, but the Heritage Centre of the Lancastrian Theatre Organ Trust might be of interest. It's at Eccles, Manchester, just off the ring road (M62 from memory I think, on the west side of the city). You might be able to arrange a 'go' on their Wurlitzer if they don't have a concert, and the only museum dedicated to the doings of Hope-Jones is also there. If they do have a concert, they have some fine players there if theatre organs are your thing.
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As another comment on the discography of Elgar's Sonata, there is Roger Fisher's CD from Chester (Motette CD 11501, DDD, 1991). As well as the Sonata in G you also get the transcribed Severn Suite (Sonata no. 2), the Vesper Voluntaries, Cantique and Pomp & Circumstance March no. 1. So good value in terms of content.
I find it a most attractive listening experience. The whole thing - performer, organ, acoustic - seems to fit the music so well. Sometimes it seems the miking was a little distant though, resulting in some loss of detail in places, but it was recorded in a cathedral after all.
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In post #20 mf2701 said:
"The Elgar Sonata is not organ music, but music played on the organ"
I find this statement curious in that, as far as I am aware, Elgar did compose it explicitly for the organ. Perhaps the statement refers to the perceived idiom of the music, though if so, that aspect is not mentioned in the post.
The statement "The Second Sonata is Brass Band music played on the organ" is true. It was transcribed by Ivor Atkins, with Elgar's blessing and active involvement in that they collaborated on aspects of it including registration towards the end of Elgar's life. However the registration could not have been informed in detail by the disposition of the Hope-Jones organ at Worcester. Although Atkins was the organist there for a long time (1897 - 1950) and therefore would have known the H-J organ intimately, it had been rebuilt by Harrison's in the 1920s, though it still retained more than a touch of Hope-Jones's tonalities at the time the transcription was made.
CEP
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It's possible these problems are a reflection of data jams caused by old hardware making up part of the internet infrastructure, which is creaking and outdated in some areas. It has been predicted that there will probably be a sudden increase in such problems, if it hasn't started already. See:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28786954
I couldn't access this forum for a couple of days earlier this week but then it came back yesterday. A characteristic feature of the problem is that some people can access a given site whereas others can't.
CEP
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I have Harvey Grace's 'Rhapsody' from Three Pieces for Organ (Schott & Co), long-ish and rather similar to the sort of thing W G Alcock wrote (and he, too, wrote a 'Legend'). My copy has Marmaduke Conway's signature on it from Ely and is dated November 1937. It came via my first organ teacher, Russell Missin, who was a pupil of MPC.
I also have his 'Minuet and Musette', similar to W S Lloyd Webber's style. It's in Vincent's 'The Octavo Organ Book' volume 1.
I'm also pretty sure I once had a Trumpet or Tuba tune of his, but having lent it, never got it back of course.
CEP
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Further to what I wrote above, (Colin) have you been able to add to these findings, since 1999 ?
I haven't done very much more other than on Hope-Jones's work more generally, but that's rather peripheral to the issue here I think.
has it ever been confirmed on which of the Worcester instruments the Sonata was premiered ?
It had to have been the 4 manual Hill in the south transept. The H-J instrument wasn't ready until the following year, and the 3 manual Hill in the quire did not have a wide enough manual compass. Whether this means Elgar composed the work for this organ is a subtly different question, though probably irrelevant. It was definitely intended that Blair should play it for a gathering of American visiting organists, thus Elgar rushed the score to him with only a few days to go, which is probably why Blair made a mess of it (though he was said to have been a dipsomaniac also). Blair was the cathedral organist, and thus the 4 manul Hill was the only organ in the building which could have been used.CEP -
Thank you for those kind words (#7), firstrees, but it's somewhat embarrassing to direct people to one's own work!
This thread is partly about whether one likes Elgar's music. Although it's of little broader consequence, personally I find much of it very beautiful. I have mastered (sort of) the first three movements of the Sonata but the fourth is beyond me. Many years ago I played for the induction of a priest when I was living in Malvern (maybe that's why I like him - he's in the very air there). The priest had asked for the first movement of the Sonata to be played at the end - on a two manual tracker organ! Anyway, I slogged through it as best I could while they were all processing out behind the bishop of - you've guessed it - Worcester. At the end the bishop very kindly came up, dressed back in mufti, and said how much he had enjoyed it, remarking that he had walked as slowly as was decent so he could savour it. He then said I must come and play it to him in his cathedral, though he regretted that the H-J organ was no longer there. Obviously very knowledgeable. That was in Christopher Robinson's day.
I find Elgar uses the organ to good effect with the orchestra, for example at the end of the Enigma Variations and Cockaigne. When it enters, I find both these examples incredibly moving and among the most wonderful moments in all music. It's a travesty that so many conductors omit the organ, and it's quite difficult to find recordings which include it just by looking at their sleeves.
Unlike Phoneuma (a Hope-Jones stop name by the way, dreamed up by his brother Kenyon who was a classics scholar), I'm not as keen on Gerontius but that's as much the fault (if that's the right word) of Cardinal Newman as Elgar - I'm not a Roman Catholic so I simply don't have the necessary cultural background to understand it properly at a spiritual level. But I've never been at a performance when the hair on my neck doesn't stand up when Praise to the Holiest peals out. Wonderful stuff, quite wonderful, for a country boy with scarcely a music lesson to his name.
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Apologies, but I can't resist the opportunity to post a link to the first article I ever put on my website, 15 years ago now!
http://www.pykett.org.uk/elgar%27s_organ_sonata.htm
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Or these? - lots of options here:
http://www.castors-online.co.uk/?gclid=CIKNyIyphsACFUfnwgodIDEAyQ
CEP
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Yes, there shouldn't be any weight distribution problem with a concrete floor in a structural sense. If it's covered with parquet-type material the rollers could cause havoc with that though as the organ is dragged back and forth - just because of the pressure as I outlined above. As to the type of rollers to use, you might look at so-called 'piano rollers' or 'piano dollies' as used by specialist furniture removers. They can be obtained quite easily. I've seen the underside of a moveable plinth which bore the weight of a huge 4 manual detached console in a cathedral and it incorporated several of these. Rubber tyred ones are probably best to minimise floor damage.
CEP
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Without knowing something more about the weight in numerical terms, I can't really help. However bear in mind that there is often a consequential problem about using rollers/castors, even if you can find items which will be man enough for the job. They usually result in a considerable reduction in the total area in contact with the floor, and thus a considerable increase in pressure under the rollers (because pressure equals total weight divided by total surface area in contact with the floor). Depending on their construction, this can therefore ruin floors. It can also cause potentially serious structural problems if the weight (redistributed by the rollers) becomes focused on just one or two joists, compared to the situation without rollers when it might have been more evenly spread across several of them.
Sorry to be a Jeremiah but I have come across these sorts of problems before.
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I will quite understand if members feel I'm becoming an utter nuisance on this topic, but it does coincide exactly with my interest in time, both as a professional physicist and an amateur musician. One of the beautiful aspects of our universe which unites both subjects and pulls them together in a most mysterious way is time.
But because of my amateur status as a musician, I am therefore grateful for what I have learnt from others who have posted here. I find Vox Humana's thoughtful posts, in particular, most revealing and helpful, and although he modestly tells us (often) that he doesn't know everything, he knows a darn sight more than I.
In #17 Vox said that "most organists - and not only them - don't bother to verify their information". That might be true, I don't know, but it's certainly the case that one can get a lot of help from what might seem to be dry academic texts at first sight. I'll quote from Fenner Douglass's wonderful book ('The Language of the Classical French Organ'):
"One antique organ, played with the grace and delicacy the music invites, can teach us more than a dozen treatises on registration, on ornaments, or even on fine points of organ building. The theoretical comments out of their proper contexts remain at best a dangerous asset".
Against that backdrop, Douglass then analyses in exquisite detail those pre-Revolutionary organs themselves and how they were played, including the way they might have been registered and nuances of performance including ornaments and staccato/legato.
Because of Bach's interest in French music, might he have absorbed some of this into his own performance style? He would probably have come across enough people who had worked on French organs and knew how they were played, of which Gottfried Silbermann's brother Andreas was but one. Andreas also trained Gottfried, and JSB knew him well.
I'll leave it there. Thank you for your patience if you've read this far.
CEP
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Speaking of slow tempi, though not a Baroque one in this case, how about this - Widor himself playing "the" Toccata in old age:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8vz1D_L_OE
It's well known of course and I expect most members will have heard it. However, the way he achieves the required subjective accent on the first of each of the recurring quaver-pairs comes through this old recording very well. Not all modern players come near this, and one reason might be that they take it too fast.
I also find the timing of his pedal part interesting. Compensating for the slowness of the action and the speech of the huge pipes perhaps?
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Is there not another factor as well to take into account? Over a lifetime, would it have been the case that a given musician varied her/his tempi as well as other nuances of their playing? If so, might this have been partly unconscious and partly the result of experience and learning? Did Bach play a given organ piece in the same way when he was that rumbustious teenager at Arnstadt compared with the way he played it towards the end of his life in his sixties?
Mostly rhetorical questions, and I certainly do not have the answers even if others do (which is why I am asking the questions here). But I have observed similar phenomena affecting the way some modern players and conductors (by which I mean those whose lives have coincided with the ability to record their performances) subtly change their technique as they move towards a mature style.
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My piano & organ teacher carried a portable metronome - a device like a tape measure, but with calibrations for musical tempi and acting as a pendulum. It's really not that difficult to obtain the relevant tempo from such a device.
Exactly. The very thing I was describing above Tony, and as I said, my organ teacher used one as well. I think the salient point is that such a device does the job well enough, rather than being a highly precise scientific instrument in the sense a clock pendulum has to be if it is to keep good time over several days.
It would probably also be good enough for setting the initial beat rates of the tempered intervals in a chosen temperament, which could then be tweaked by ear to taste by an expert tuner when laying the bearings.
Although I completely take on board Vox's reservations which he made in #5, the fact that such devices were used in my (and Tony's) lifetime shows that they were not show stoppers.
Incidentally, calibrating a plumb line type of pendulum is not difficult and would not have been then (i.e. post-Newton). The length of a 'seconds' pendulum, one which takes one second to swing from one extremity to the other, is almost exactly one metre. Provided the bob is small compared to the pendulum length, and much more massive than the string, the time period does not depend on the weight of the bob for practical purposes (not many people know that!). The time period then varies as the square root of the pendulum length. (Good old Newton, and Galileo before him, were jolly clever to work all this out, weren't they).
Simple, as the meerkats would say, and it would have been simple then to those in the know I suspect.
CEP
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Quickly in relation to what?
John's question hits the nail right on the head. Absolute, as opposed to relative, time is the issue which which Vox Humana started this topic and which I addressed in post #2. Issues such as notes inégales relate to relative time and are therefore of a different kind.
We should also remember that there is probably no single 'correct' answer in any of this. Let's assume that an organist in village A used a plumb line type of pendulum to set his tempi (or temperaments) as I suggested. This does not mean that his colleague in village B would have done so. If the two villages were more than a few miles apart they would seldom have met. Travel was so difficult and time consuming in those days that it is sometimes easy to forget this when we can just jump into a car - the only way to travel was on shanks's or a real pony, and then only if the weather was decent.
Travel difficulties were a major reason why pitch standards varied so much (Cammerton, Chorton and all that, and even these might have only specified a range of frequencies, not a single one). The same applies when we look at the plethora of temperaments used in the Baroque era - how many organ builders would even know what their colleagues more than a few miles away were doing? I can scarcely believe that many of them would have read books by Mersenne, Werckmeister, etc, and they probably hadn't even seen them.
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Tempo means time, and this has been one of my hobby horses for a good while. There are many questions and not many answers, so instead of pretending I know them, I'll just reel out a few of the questions.
In those days how was time measured? The long case (grandfather) clock had not been around all that long - Newton had only just explained properly how the pendulum worked. It depends on gravity, and that was not within the grasp of human knowledge until he came along.
And portable time - meaning how was time measured at the console for purposes such as checking beat rates when tuning (important for setting the imperfectly-tuned intervals in all temperaments, particularly an unfamiliar one) and checking the speed at which you are playing (the issue in the post above)? The metronome as we know it was not invented until the 19th century, though it was an acknowledged problem much earlier and attempts were being made to produce clock-like devices which musicians could use around the end of the 17th century. As far as I know, they were not very practical though. Apart from anything else, they didn't 'tick' very loudly, if at all.
Pocket watches? Yes, they were around and there is a portrait of Henry VIII wearing a huge one round his neck (therefore not really a 'pocket' watch). This is because they were extremely expensive and a symbol of great wealth. But they were not very reliable nor good timekeepers, and the sweep seconds hand which is required by a musician did not exist as far as I know. Harrison's exquisite chronometers did not appear until the mid-18th century, but even so they were scarcely the sort of thing your average working musician could have got hold of. In any case, we are speaking of the Baroque era here, not the Classical.
Wrist watches - duh, no, 19th century stuff.
So what did those 'ordinary' people do (bearing in mind that, apart from his mighty intellect, even Bach was 'ordinary' in the sense of his origins and means)? I don't know. Did they routinely have some sort of innate sense of time which we today have since lost perhaps? One of my favourite conjectures, which has generated both approval and ridicule elsewhere, is that they might have used a simple pocket pendulum such as piece of string with a bob (weight) on the end. (i.e. a builder's plumb line, which has been commonplace for millenia). A child could have observed that the bob swung periodically while her/his dad was doing a bit of masonry work. If s/he later became a musician maybe s/he might have hit on the idea of using one for musical purposes - the string could have had marks on it to correspond to the beat rates of a favourite temperament perhaps, or to indicate tempi much as the wand and sliding weight of a metronome does today. A musician could unwind the string to the required mark and off s/he would go.
Similar cheap plastic devices (pocket metronomes) paralleling the construction of the handyman's expanding steel ruler used the same principle. They were available from virtually all music shops until the advent of today's electronic metronomes. My first organ teacher used one at the console. They might still be available today - I haven't checked. Were they, by any chance, the final evolved form of the 'musician's plumb line' I've postulated above?
But if not, what else could they have done?
I could go on and on, and there are indeed yet other options, but as pointed out above, scholarly articles are not really what the forum wants so I won't give any references to my purple prose on the matter here.
CEP
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As a point of interest, am I right in thinking that Jan Mulder doesn't do the triple pedalling in the final Andante maestoso, except in the final chord?
I couldn't hear them either, but it's rather difficult to judge. However he does seem to miss out other bits and pieces as well, to the extent I hit the 'pause' button after a while so I could get my copy of the music out. For instance, the stalking staccato figuration in the pedals seems to be omitted over several bars at one point (difficult to specify in writing here as my score doesn't have bar numbers). And the left hand part seems to be virtually missing 4 bars before the final Tempo Primo.
I've found similar things occurred with other recordings of this Sonata. One memorable 'ouch' was when Robert Joyce at Llandaff let his foot drag on and on on the pedals at one point when it should long have been lifted during the Pastorale. Rather odd that it should have made it to the final pressing (vinyl of course in those days) because surely it would have been easy just to re-record it.
Mind you, might it be my copy and not their fault at all? I use Eaglefield Hull's edition of 1912 (lovely, large, thick, yellowed pages I might add). Am I missing out on later research perhaps?
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That depends on the Tuba Colin!
That's true of course Tony. (And, magically, the auto-quote facility is working again now).
I must admit that my view expressed in # 89 was perhaps formed at an over-impressionable age by my music master at school, who had somewhat monochrome views on most aspects of life. He was once giving me an impromptu lesson on the Binns at the Nottingham Albert Hall, and on seeing me get the Cocker out of my music case he said "oh don't bother with that rubbish, try this one", whereupon he produced Whitlock's Paean (number five of his Five Short Pieces) and proceeded to play it. Ever since, like him, I have preferred it, though as I said, I was probably of somewhat immature taste then. These early experiences from strong-minded pedagogues do tend to stick with one though, don't they! And in those days, most music masters seemed to play the organ. He was mainly qualified in modern languages though, but also had ARCO and other similar post-nominals and had gravitated to music. And a qualified hockey referee - many teachers then were almost polymaths, it now seems to me. But I digress.
Happy days, and how lucky we were.
CEP
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I'm feeling guilty about contributing to the apparently boundless expansion of this topic's thread, but as I haven't yet been ticked off about it by the moderators, I'll carry on (encouraged by the fact I'm obviously not alone).
In a previous post (#70) David Drinkell referred to the Cocker Tuba Tune by saying:
" ... including that awkward bit in the middle ... "
(Sorry, but I couldn't get the auto quote facility to work for some reason, so have had to do it the low-tech way).
Might I ask him, as one whose judgement I am coming to respect, what he thinks about this "awkward bit" musically? Although I can play the thing tolerably well in terms of getting the notes right, I've never wanted to perform it as I find the effect of continuous thick chords on Tuba alone most unpleasant.
Yet it must be me who's wrong I suppose, as it's popularity remains reasonably high.
CEP
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Am I alone in detecting a sense of humour failure somewhere here?
Oh my days ...
CEP
Notre Dame - inaugural recital after restoration
in General discussion
Posted
I don't think contributors to an internet discussion forum can be criticised for being ringside commentators, after all, that's what such forums are for, among other things. But I think their remarks might carry more weight if they were prepared to tell the rest of us who they actually are. Now wouldn't that be nice.
CEP