Recent content by fanvault

It is interesting that Brahms wrote organ music only at the start and the finish of his career. When you travel to Vienna, you can listen to (and sometimes play) instruments that he certainly heard if not performed on. Whether these were organs he considered ideal for his music is not certain...

I’d love to hear from anyone who has experience of continuo playing. I have only done so very occasionally but found it far more enjoyable than I expected. It’s one of those things you grind through as a student, with your mind elsewhere, trying to work out those wretched figures and wondering...

An artist has the power to hold an audience in his/her hand. This is largely achieved through skill in those ‘infinitesimal pauses’ (Landowska) and leading the ear in its expectation and their confirming or contradicting that expectation. Phrasing and articulation has fascinated me, especially...

Sometimes as a church organist you are asked to play what you may regard as the most awful trash. It has always puzzled me as to how well-meaning people such as clergy, Christian congregations and organists can so strongly disagree about quality. Aren’t we all aiming in the same direction...

What are your earliest memories and experiences of Messiaen? I was introduced to him – never having heard even the name - by my organ teacher with Apparition de l’eglise eternelle, and later found myself – like a lot of people wanting to try something modern and exciting – attempting Dieu parmi...

If you are like me and love not only Baroque music but the architecture under that same heading, you will be happy to come with me on an imaginary (and perhaps one day real) tour around Holzhey’s organs in Germany. Johann Nepomuk Holzhey (1741-1809) was a South German builder, whose most...

I wondered if you would like a little cycle ride along the German coast? I am thinking of East Friesland and its Friesenroute, Rad up Pad, which is part of the North Sea Cycle Route. You might be staying in the large town of Emden, which would be a good centre to head out from in almost any...

It is a sign of our growing appreciation for people and composers as individuals that we now regard Buxtehude as himself, and not as a mere “forerunner of Bach”. It is also testimony to the wonderful adventurousness of this composer’s invention. I can’t help thinking he must often have been in...

Few organ builders can have been so fortunate as Gottfried Silbermann. There being rather limited money circulating through most of the instruments’ history, most of his have been preserved unaltered in later generations. Maybe it also helped that their value was perhaps not always fully...

A lot of nonsense is talked, it seems to me, about cleaning away the dirt of “romantic” performances. It sounds like Mr. Slope in the Barchester Chronicles, “Throwing away the useless rubbish of past generations”. Some musicians are much better at self-publicity than at seeking an artistic...