GMCD 7304 You can order this CD in our E-Shop under Instrumental/Organ Reviews ***Sound Clips**	ORGAN SPECTACULAR from St. Paul's Cathedral Huw Williams at the Organ of St. Paul's Cathedral

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DDD 77:44  - Recorded: St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 8–10 February, 2005

TL

Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély was born in Paris on 13^th November 1817 and spent almost his entire life in the city, dying there on New Year’s Eve 1869. His studied organ at the city’s Conservatoire with François Benoist (who, during over five decades as Professor of Organ at the Conservatoire, taught, among others, Alkan, Franck, Bizet and Saint-Saëns) and was awarded the Premier Prix.  He went on to become one of the most celebrated organists of the day holding two of the most prestigious organist’s posts in the city; from 1847 to 1858 at the Madeleine (he was succeeded there by Saint-Saëns) and St Sulpice (where he was succeeded by Widor).   

It was shortly after Lefébure-Wély had become organist of the Madeleine that the Revolution took place which resulted in the founding of the Second French Republic and Napoleon III’s declaration of himself as President and, later, Emperor.  As a result, there was a general mood in the city of heroism and celebration which Lefébure-Wély reflected in his own compositions; which included an operetta and three symphonies.  Set beside the organ music of his younger contemporaries Lefébure-Wély’s may seem lightweight, but with its profusion of jovial tunes and boisterous marches, typified by the exuberant Sortie in E flat, it provides a matchless showcase for both a large, resourceful organ and a virtuoso player.

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in the village of Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, on 12^th October 1872, but spent most of his life in or around London where he died on 26^th August 1958.  He studied composition with Hubert Parry, later writing in his Musical Autobiography; “We pupils of Parry have [inherited] the great English choral tradition which Tallis passed on to Byrd, Byrd to Gibbons, Gibbons to Purcell, Purcell to Battishill and Greene, and they in their turn through the Wesleys to Parry”. 

While the organ itself did not figure prominently in Vaughan Williams’ output (he wrote just three original works for the instrument) he was an important figure in English church music, having edited two major hymn books, the English Hymnal (in 1906) and Songs of Praise (in 1931).  It was while he was actively seeking out traditional tunes for inclusion in the first of those that he came across the three Welsh hymn tunes on which he based the set of Three Preludes founded on Welsh Hymn Tunes, published in 1920 with a dedication to Alan Gray, organist of Trinity College, Cambridge (where Vaughan Williams had been a student).  The second of those is a calm pastorale on the tune Rhosymedre (originally composed by J D Edwards, 1805-1885) which builds to a brief climax before quickly subsiding back to the gently rocking character of the opening.

François Clément Théodore Dubois was, like Lefébure-Wély, an organ student of Benoist’s at the Paris Conservatoire.  Born near Reims on 24^th August 1837 Dubois had begun his organ studies at Reims Cathedral, but whilst at the Conservatoire, had shown exceptional gifts as a composer and, in 1861, won the coveted Prix de Rome.  This entailed a period of study in Italy, during which time he came into contact with Liszt, but on his return his attempts to break into the prestigious world of opera were persistently thwarted and, although he did manage to have a number of stage works performed in Paris, his reputation rested more on his abilities as a teacher.  After 25 years as a teacher of harmony and composition, he was appointed Director of the Paris Conservatoire in 1896.  He retired in 1905 but remained in Paris where he died on 11^th June 1924.

During the latter half of the 19^th century, musicians in Paris were mostly either connected with the opera or with the church and, having failed in the former, Dubois became involved with the musical life of several eminent Parisian churches; notably St Clotilde and the Madeleine, where he succeeded Saint-Saëns in 1877.  One contemporary wrote of him; “His art…was more suited to the church…than to the stage”, and certainly his most successful compositions were his Masses, oratorios, 71 motets and 88 pieces of organ music, mostly intended for church use.  His set of 12 pieces for organ, published in 1886, include the cheerful Toccata in G which he dedicated to Alphonse Mailly, the then Professor of Organ at the Brussels Conservatoire.

Michael Praetorius was born on 15th February 1571 at Creuzberg, near Eisenach, where his father served as a Lutheran minister.  In 1587 he was appointed organist of the Marienkirche in Frankfurt and 12 years later he entered the service of Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick, becoming Kapellmeister in 1604. Although he travelled extensively throughout northern Germany, he remained in that post until his death on the day of his 50^th birthday, 15^th February 1621. 

Naturally enough the vast bulk of Praetorius’ output was for the church and included a number of organ chorale preludes.  But this arrangement of his Ballet des Matelotz (made by Noel Rawsthorne, a former organist of Liverpool Cathedral) comes from his most famous secular instrumental work, a substantial treatise on dancing – Terpsichore - published in 1612 and dedicated to Duke Heinrich Julius.  In the dedication Praetorius explains that the work comprises “assorted French bransles, dances and melodies…brought by Your Royal Highness’ dancing master, Antoine Emeraud, from France”. 

Sir George Thalben-Ball was born in Sydney, Australia, on 18^th June 1896.  He did not stay there long, however, and his family moved to London where he enrolled at the Royal College of Music and looked set to embark on a career as a concert pianist.  However in 1919 he succeeded Sir Henry Walford Davies as organist at London’s Temple Church - in which post he remained for 62 years – and for the remainder of his life was regarded as one of England’s most colourful and charismatic organists.  He was organist of London’s Royal Albert Hall from 1934 until his death in Wimbledon on 18^th January 1987, and as City Organist in Birmingham (a post he held from 1949 until 1983), gave over 900 recitals.

Although he was a gifted improviser, his published output for the organ amounts to just a handful of works, probably the most famous being his Elegy which was published in 1944.  It is a homage to Thalben-Ball’s predecessor at the Temple Church (who died in 1941) and, in addition to bearing the dedication “to W.D.”,  is clearly modelled on Walford Davies’ own Solemn Melody.  As with the Vaughan Williams Rhosymedre Prelude, the theme is first heard in the tenor register (Thalben-Ball specifies that it should have a “cello quality”) and builds to a massive climax before rapidly subsiding to its peaceful ending.

Félix-Alexandre Guilmant was born on 12^th March 1837 in Boulogne where his father, Jean-Baptiste, was an organ builder and also served as organist at St Nicolas church in the town.  It was from him that the young Guilmant received his first organ lessons and he progressed so rapidly that, when he was 16, he was appointed to his first organist’s post; at St Joseph’s Church, Boulogne.  In 1860 he travelled to Rouen to hear the great Belgian organist/composer Nikolaus Lemmens perform and was so impressed that he chose to study with Lemmens at the Brussels Conservatoire.  He subsequently became organist of La Trinité in Paris, a post he held for 30 years, and founded the Schola Cantorum, a school for church musicians in Paris, where Guilmant continued to teach right up until his death on 30^th March 1911.

As a composer Guilmant was exceptionally prolific, but despite the fact that he wrote so much (well over 1000 individual pieces), it is nearly all of the highest quality combining solid craftsmanship with a real gift for both melody and effect.  Typical of his lighter, more delicate pieces, is the bubbly Interlude in F which first appeared in the fifth volume (Op.19) of his vast series of Pièces d’orgue dans différents styles.  Despite the relative simplicity of the material – chords which alternate between the hands above a quasi-pizzicato pedal – the effect is utterly captivating.

John Ireland was born on 13^th August 1879 in Cheshire, not far from the city of Manchester where his father was a newspaper publisher and editor.  His mother, 30 years’ younger than his father, was a writer and biographer, but both parents died within a year of each other whilst Ireland was still in his mid-teens and it was entirely through his own dogged determination that he was able to gain a place at the Royal College of Music.  Initially he studied the piano but went on to learn the organ – his tutor was Sir Walter Parratt – and, after becoming the youngest ever Fellow of the Royal College of Organists, was appointed Assistant Organist at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, London, before, in 1904, being appointed organist at St Luke’s Chelsea.  Ireland left St Luke’s in 1926 and, right up to his death in Sussex on 13^th June 1962, never involved himself in church or organ music seriously again. 

At the Royal College of Music he had also studied composition with Sir Charles Stanford who, after describing Ireland’s music as “all Brahms and water”, encouraged him to study 16^th century music.  As a result Ireland developed a love for English song – something much in vogue amongst English composers of the 16^th century – and, calling on his own literary upbringing, became one of the most important English song composers of the time.  His contribution to the organ repertoire was, however, small, comprising just eight pieces.  The Capriccio, composed in 1911 and dedicated to H L Balfour, organist of Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, contrasts delicate filigree-like figurations with the fine, song-like melody which brings the work to its triumphant conclusion.

Giacomo Meyerbeer, unlike Théodore Dubois, did become successful as an opera composer in Paris; something all the more surprising since he was not French by birth (he was born near Berlin on 5^th September 1791) and never actually lived permanently in the city (although he died there 2^nd May 1864).  His first opera was staged in Munich in 1812, four years later he travelled to Italy where he had several more operatic successes in Padua, Turin, Venice and Milan, and in 1825, made his first extended trip to Paris.  In all he composed six operas for Paris, of which the most popular and, arguably his greatest operatic success of all, was Le prophète premièred in the Paris Opéra on 16^th April 1849.  The fourth act contains a lavish coronation scene set in Münster Cathedral accompanied by the noble Coronation March heard here in an arrangement by Bryan Hesford.

Herbert Howells was born in Lydney, Gloucestershire, on 17^th October 1892, and although his background was relatively humble – his father worked in a factory which assembled bus bodies and his mother worked in a laundry – he decided at a very early age that he wanted to be a composer.  At the age of 13 he went to the organist of Gloucester Cathedral for lessons and two years later won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music where for five years he studied organ and composition.  He was appointed Sub-Organist of Salisbury Cathedral but had to resign shortly after taking the appointment because of ill-health.  He survived to the age of 91 (dying in London on 23^rd February 1983), but returned only once to the organ; when, excused military service during the second World War, he stood in as Organist at St John’s College Cambridge.  

It was during that time that he wrote the Six Pieces for Organ published in 1940 and dedicated to a fellow-pupil from Gloucester who was then the cathedral organist there, Herbert Sumsion.  The third of these, Master Tallis’s Testament, reflects Howells’ own comment - “all through my life I’ve had this strange feeling that I belonged somehow to the Tudor period” - for while it does not employ an authentic Tallis melody, the tender theme with its almost speech-like rhythm, evokes the essential spirit of the music of that period.  That theme is put through a set of three variations which reach a glorious climax, only to end with a tiny, distant echo; as if the spirit of Tallis, so vividly brought into focus, is finally receding back through the mists of time.

Sir Edward Cuthbert Bairstow was born in Huddersfield on 22^nd August 1874 and, apart from spells at Oxford, studying at Balliol College, and London, first as an articled pupil of Frederick Bridge at Westminster Abbey and then, between 1893 and 1899, as organist of All Saints Norfolk Square, he spent his entire professional life as an organist in the north of England; Wigan Parish Church (1899-1907), Leeds Parish Church (1907-1913) and York Minster (from 1913 until his death in the city on 1^st May 1946).

It was in 1937 whilst holidaying on the Isle of Arran that he composed his most extended solo organ work, the Sonata in E flat. The second of its three movements is a Scherzo which opens and closes in jubilant mood with flying semiquavers and fanfare-like outbursts from the tuba.  A quieter central section seems to evoke the ancient landscape of the Scottish island where it was conceived. 

Guy Bovet was born in Neuchâtel on 22^nd May 1942.  He studied the organ with Marie-Claire Alain and in 1962 was awarded the Premier Prix de Virtuosité from the Conservatoire at Geneva.  In 1980 he took up a teaching post at the University of Oregon and has also been on the academic staff of the University of Salamanca in Spain.  He now divides his time between Switzerland (where he is Titular Organist of the Collegiate Church in Neuchâtel, curator of the organ at Romainmotier, organ tutor at the Basel Musikhochschule and editor of the Swiss magazine Le Tribune de l’Orgue) and the USA (where is an Honorary Citizen of the City of Dallas).  He is an active recitalist whose annual schedule regularly takes in Europe, America, Australia and Asia.

Indeed his travels as a recitalist are at the heart of the 3 Préludes Hambourgeois which were published as a set in 1989.  These began life as improvisations given during recitals in, respectively, Spain, the southern United States and Germany.  The third of the set, Hamburger Totentanz, dates from 1970 when Bovet gave an improvisation as part of a concert in Hamburg organised by a local organist, Herbert Wulf (to whom the piece is dedicated).  As Bovet explains, “it is full of more or less hidden quotations of well-known musical themes by Offenbach, Beethoven and Wagner inserted into a big crescendo on an ostinato rhythm”.

Percy Whitlock was born in Chatham, Kent, on 1^st June 1903 and joined the choir of nearby Rochester Cathedral at the age of seven.  He remained a singer at the cathedral until, at the age of 17, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music where he studied composition with Stanford and Vaughan Williams.  He returned to Rochester Cathedral as assistant organist in 1923, but, having been passed over for Organist when the post became vacant in 1930, he moved to Bournemouth where he was appointed both Borough Organist and organist at St Stephen’s Church.  He died in Bournemouth on 1^st May 1946.

His output includes light orchestral works and choral pieces, but by far and away his best known compositions were his organ works, the first to be published being a set of Five Short Pieces written during Whitlock’s final year at Rochester.  The second is a charming Folk Tune which, with its ingratiating melody, displays the organ’s softer stops. 

Eugène Gigout was born in Nancy on 23^rd March 1844 and, at the age of 13 enrolled at the Ecole Niedermeyer in Paris.  He subsequently became a teacher at the school, married Niedermeyer’s daughter and, in 1863, was appointed organist at the church of St Augustin, a post he held for 62 years until his death in Paris on 9^th December 1925.  He founded his organ school in the city, and in 1911 was appointed Professor of Organ at the Paris Conservatoire. 

His output for the instrument was extensive, but most of his best-known works for the instrument appeared in a collection of 10 Pieces published in 1892.  The eighth piece in that set is the dance-like Scherzo dedicated to “Monsieur M J Erb” and containing, in its central section, some captivating echo effects.

Herbert Murrill was a Londoner by birth – born in the city on 11^th May 1909 – and spent most of his professional life there, where from 1933 until his death on 24^th July 1952, he was professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music.  He also served as Head of Music at the BBC.  His output was, naturally enough given his eminent academic position, wide-ranging and included an opera, two film scores, orchestral works (including two cello concertos), chamber and vocal pieces but, it is probably fair to say, that his most famous work is one of just three he composed for the organ; the Carillon, dedicated to Arnold Richardson, and published in 1949.

The brilliant, bell-like passagework which opens the piece continues throughout, occasionally passing into the pedals, and interrupted by majestic fanfares from the solo reeds. 

Henry Purcell  was also a Londoner, born in 1659 into a family with a long musical tradition.  His father had sung at the Coronation of Charles II (marking the restoration of the British monarchy after a period during which musical and theatrical entertainment had been banned) and he appears to have been responsible for securing a place for his son in the choir of the Chapel Royal.  Clearly Henry was a prodigiously gifted child and by the time he was eight he had already written some songs.  He was appointed organist of Westminster Abbey in 1679, and remained in that post until his death on 21^st November 1695  (his tomb can be seen in the Abbey to this day).  He was also one of the first post-Restoration English composers to write operas; although as the English public remained suspicious of opera, Purcell was obliged to devote more of his energies to providing incidental music to stage plays.

Purcell wrote incidental music for around 50 plays and it was in this capacity that he composed some of his greatest purely instrumental music.  Perhaps the best-known of these is the stirring Rondeau from his incidental music to Abdelazar, or The Moor’s Revenge, a play by the first female professional writer in English literature, Aphra Benn, staged in London in 1695.  This was the theme which Britten took in 1946 as the basis for his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

William Mathias was Welsh by birth – he was born in Whitland, south west Wales on 1^st May 1934 – and spent virtually his entire life in the Principality, serving as Professor of Music in Bangor University from 1970 until 1987.  After his retirement he remained in North Wales and died near Bangor on 29^th July 1992.  He did have a close association with St Paul’s Cathedral, however - not least because his anthem Let the People Praise Thee O God was performed in the cathedral to a worldwide television audience of millions when it was sung at the wedding of HRH The Prince of Wales and The Lady Diana Spencer on 29^th July 1981 - and four months after his death a Service of Thanksgiving for his life and work was held in the Cathedral.

A prolific composer in virtually every genre, he was particularly highly regarded for his organ music and of the 16 pieces he wrote for the instrument, the infectious Processional dating from 1965, with its spiky rhythm and witty tune, remains by far and away the most popular.

Jeremiah Clarke was probably born in 1674 but his origins lay shrouded in mystery (there is graffiti on the choir-stalls of St George’s Chapel in Windsor – “I ere: Clarke: 1683” – which implies he may have been a chorister there).  His name first appears in the records of St Paul’s Cathedral when, at the age of 19, he was appointed Almoner and Master of the Choristers.  Two years later, in 1695, he became the first organist of the present St Paul’s Cathedral (the previous building having been destroyed in the Great Fire of London of 1666) and held that post until 1^st December 1707 when he apparently committed suicide by shooting himself following an unsuccessful love-affair.  He was buried in the Cathedral’s crypt two days later.

For many years this famous Trumpet Voluntary was thought to have been composed by Purcell, but in the 1960s it was discovered that Clarke had actually composed the piece, published in 1700 as “The Prince of Denmark’s March” in A Choice Collection of Ayres for the Harpsichord which included pieces by a number of different composers.

Edward Elgar, who was born at Broadheath, near Worcester, on 2^nd June 1857, was the son of an organist and did, himself, play the organ at St George’s Roman Catholic Church in Worcester.  He wrote a few organ pieces – most notably a large-scale Sonata – but Elgar’s fame was as the first English composer since Purcell to achieve international recognition.  By the time of his death in Worcester on 23^rd February 1934 his international reputation had been assured, but it came fairly late in life; he was 42 when his first real success - the 

Variations on an Original Theme for orchestra - was premièred at the 1899 Three Choirs Festival.  This work has become better known as the “Enigma” Variations; a name derived from the enigmatic nature both of the theme on which it is based and the dedication of each of its 14 variations.

 The ninth of those variations – Nimrod – is certainly the best known; its enigmatic title derived from the fact that the name of its dedicatee, Elgar’s friend A E Jaeger, is the German word for a hunter and King Nimrod was described in The Bible as “the Mighty Hunter”.  William Harris’ classic transcription of the piece for organ begins with the theme given almost hymn-like treatment before it builds to its massive climax.

Charles-Marie Widor was born on 21^st February 1844 into a family with the organ very much in its blood; both his grandfather and father had been organists.  At the age of 11 he was appointed organist at the Lycée in his home city of Lyon where his playing enthralled the great organ builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll who persuaded Widor’s parents to send their son to Brussels to have lessons from Lemmens.  In 1870 Widor was appointed organist at St Sulpice, Paris, and remained in that post for an amazing 64 years.  He died in Paris on 12^th March 1937, having become one of the city’s pre-eminent organists and a key figure in turn-of-the-century French music. 

Widor’s output was extensive and included stage, orchestral and chamber works, but his fame as a composer rests largely on just one movement from one of his 10 symphonies for organ solo, the Toccata from his Symphony No.5 in F.  Written for a recital Widor was to give in 1880 in the church of St François-de-Salles in Lyon (where his own father had been organist and where Cavaillé-Coll had just completed a rebuild of the organ), he chose to impress his home crowd with what has become, surely, the most famous and spectacular piece of organ music of all.                                                        

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