CE St Matthew’s Church, Westminster, London [R] Wed, 11th Jan 2023

[DracoM]

Reminder: rpt this p.m.

[Finzi4ever]

I think the difficulty was the absence of a swell box. (The organ only had a Great and a Positive division....and 1 pedal stop.) A swell manual is such a staple of Anglican music. I think if contrasts were made (as needed in the Jackson for instance) the sudden slamming on of a mixture or the only unenclosed trumpet might have been rather a shock! So no-one to blame, I think....except.knowing the organ's limitations, perhaps a different set of canticles might have been chosen? It's a fine setting, but maybe it was chosen because of FJ's recent death.

Quite agree, but the C major did sound excellently bright on it, especially the entry of the Trumpet in the Pedal.

[Keraulophone]

Quite agree, but the C major did sound excellently bright on it, especially the entry of the Trumpet in the Pedal.

So it did, though a different kind of clarity from what we'd hear, say, on a Silbermann of JSB's time.

It put me in mind of Bach and Expression a 2 DVD + 2 CD release from Fugue State Films in which "Daniel Moult and Martin Schmeding give richly detailed presentations about the nature, history and performance practice of a broad selection of Bach’s organ works, and then perform the pieces themselves on four individual but complementary central German organs – two Silbermanns in Rötha, the big Trost in Waltershausen and the Hildebrandt in Sangerhausen".

https://fuguestatefilms.co.uk/product/bach-and-expression/

I've just put in my order and will report back (after quite a lot of listening!) on the organ thread.

In a bit of a punt, I couldn't resist adding Sietze de Vries's Expanded Orgelbüchlein (nothing to do with the better known Orgelbüchlein Project: https://orgelbuechlein.co.uk/). It could be fascinating, or...

https://fuguestatefilms.co.uk/product/bach-missing-pages-orgelbuchlein/