DariusB

That's an interesting site - thanks. Though it does list the Leeds organ incorrectly as having 73 stops instead of 81. Even if you exclude the pedal borrowings it's still 78. But it still strikes me as odd that anyone would think that cramming a large number of stops onto three manuals is a good thing!

That's strange - it was OK for a couple of hours then disappeared. Anyway here's a link to the same document which will hopefully be more durable: http://www.organrecitals.com/1/2003leeds.pdf I'm not sure about in the world, but I'd heard it was the largest 3-manual in Europe. Not sure that's anything to boast about though! - 81 stops is too many to manage on three manuals really. But we hope it won't be for much longer....

Opening recital of the 2019-20 season at Leeds Town Hall on Monday at 1.05pm. Mendelssohn 1st sonata, a Percy Grainger arrangement for piano and organ, and finishing with Lemare Variations on Hanover, preceded by two of his summer sketches. And the D minor Toccata & Fugue to start the whole thing off. The full season listing attached. Please come along and/or spread the word - we always get a good audience, but the more the better! lth1920.pdf

The Sheffield organ is used regularly but infrequently ( I played it last in June). The acoustic is awful and the organ isn't in great shape, though David Wood does a great job keeping it going and is doing repairs slowly as funds become gradually available - far from the complete clean and overhaul it really needs. It all works although the quiet parts of the Solo are very unreliable and there's water damage to the 32' Open. But playing the restored organ at the Freemason's Hall in London - which is just a smaller version of the same instrument - made me realise how well the Willis III voicing copes with a very dry acoustic, and how good the Sheffield organ could be if it was really restored properly.

Connecting two elements of this discussion together - Johannes Geffert has done some research into accounts of Mendelssohn's organ playing by his contemporaries. One of them relates that if he had assistants available he would request frequent changes of registration - even within phrases. If that's true of a relatively conservative Romantic composer, surely Liszt would have been even more likely to have wanted frequent changes of colour if it were possible. Of course that's potentially a dangerous road to go down, but as Liszt above almost all composers valued virtuosity and technical difficulty in performance, it's hard not to find his organ music a bit technically 'safe' compared to the piano music, and perhaps to conclude that bolder/ more frequent use of the pedals (like Straube in the Peters edition) is legitimate. Anyway I've put it into a recital in November so maybe I should be careful what I say!

Judith Bingham’s Ancient Sunlight Is interesting and rather beautiful, and I think there are other pieces by her as well. Diana Burrell’s Arched forms with Bells was a Proms commission back in the 90s though I don’t remember much about it. I’ve recently performed Thea Musgrave’s contribution to the Orgelbuchlein project. And there’s at least one piece by Florence Price - the first African American woman to have a piece performed by a professional symphony orchestra - in the series King of Kings - organ music by black composers, which is well worth investigating with some really interesting music. Though I admit it’s not much - and on a related topic, we could do with more organ recitals by women as well!

For those interested, there is another article about it in the issue of Private Eye which came out today. I can't post a link as it's print-only!