Three organ concerts:  Cornwall - Isle of Man - Sussex

Dear Reader,

After a busy and rewarding few weeks of concert-giving, including visits to Turkey and the Ukraine, I finally have time to draw breath and share with you my impressions of three recent organ concerts.

On September 11th I paid a return visit to the beautiful Cornish town of Kilkhampton. The Methodist chapel there has an unaltered Father Willis organ from the 1860s; an extremely fine and cleverly designed little instrument. The organ in St. James' Church, the venue for my concert, is even more historic. It is said to include material from an 18th century instrument in Westminster Abbey; be that as it may, it certainly contains many old pipes, and a rebuild in the 1950s left it as a zippy little instrument of 21 stops. In my first concert at Kilkhampton, a year ago, it had coped admirably with a performance of Reger's great Fantasia on "How Brightly Shines the Morning Star"; this year it was put through its paces in almost as demanding a fashion with Sigismund Neukomm's "Grand Dramatic Fantasia: A Concert on a Lake Interrupted by a Thunderstorm". Neukomm is little remembered these days, but he was a friend of Mendelssohn and a frequent visitor to England; he performed at the opening of the epoch-making organ in Birmingham Town Hall in 1843.

Storm fantasias, of course, were once a staple of the concert organ repertoire, before suffering a complete eclipse as musical taste changed in the 1900s. For years they have been considered hopelessly naive and populist by generations of organists brought up on a more ascetic musical diet. But at their best they are colourful, dramatic, and really display the full scope and colour of the organ. I consider the Neukomm to be the best of its genre, from the calls of the hunting horns echoing across the lake and the Mozartian flute concerto, through the rumblings and lightnings of the storm itself, to the hymn of thanksgiving with variations for bassoon and carillon. The gutsy little organ at Kilkhampton carried it off superbly, with an atmospheric accompaniment of rain battering against the windows and roof of the church.

Two weeks later I travelled to the Isle of Man for three concerts in a festival of early music. After harpsichord performances with Red Priest and recorder player Piers Adams in the Arts Centre at Port Erin, I was taken to the centre of the island to the hamlet of St. Mark. Here is a small 18th century church, utterly remote, utterly idyllic. As the car engine died, the silence was absolute, broken only by the far-off calls of birds soaring above the hills. In such a situation there is a special magic about a performance; the music seems to come out of nothing, and fade away into an enduring peace.

My early-music programme seemed very appropriate for the venue, and for the melodious 8-stop chamber organ: it included the great, reflective A-minor Fantasia by Gibbons; a sensuous Elevation Toccata by Frescobaldi; abstract counterpoint by Bull; an Adagio by Mozart; a jaunty concerto by Stanley and, finally, the "Wedge" Prelude and Fugue in E-minor (BWV 548) by Bach. In programming a concert thus - roughly sequential in time, from early to late - Bach's music is heard with full intensity as the culmination and summation of the Baroque era, with all the drama and impact that it made on listeners of the time. This is surely fairer to Bach than the traditional Bach/Beethoven/Brahms approach, in which his music is heard as a kind of prelude - even a warm-up for the performer - before the later repertoire. (Alas, this regime still holds in many organ performances.) The "Wedge" itself is, of course, one of the finest of Bach's large-scale organ works. It combines intellectual rigour with sparkling virtuosity, while its driving rhythms remind us that Bach was well-acquainted with the exuberant concertos of Vivaldi.

And so to the 1878 Father Willis organ at All Saints, Hastings. A concert had been arranged at short notice for the Hastings Week celebrations, and a popular programme requested. The "Wedge" made an appearance, as did the Neukomm "Storm"; they were accompanied by everything from Mesomedes of Crete (c.130 AD, with its evocations of ancient Greek flutes, bagpipes and drums) to "The Orient Express" by the great theatre organist Sidney Torch. I was glad to be able to perform "Master Tallis's Testament" by Herbert Howells, a piece which I first heard as a young teenager one summer's day after evensong in Worcester Cathedral. The plaintive, nostalgic music floated round the building as the evening sunlight, slanting through the cathedral windows, glowed gently on the yellow stone. It made a deep impression on a budding young organist, and the tableau remains with me every time I begin to play the piece. The generous, warm tones of the Hastings Willis were as appropriate for Howells as for Neukomm, and indeed for Bach and Mesomedes. Here is an organ of intensely individual character, a fine and responsive vehicle for many contrasting styles of music. The audience was large, attentive and enthusiastic: what more could a performer want?

Good wishes,

Julian Rhodes