Great Cathedral Organs

VARIOUS ARTISTS

13-CD set plus a CD-ROM

Complete here for the first time on CD, the Great Cathedral Organ Series captured in sonic snapshot the finest organs, organists and organ music to be heard in late 1960s Britain. This generously filled box complements the original 19 LPs with bonus tracks from two celebrated virtuosi – Simon Preston and Fernando Germani – and a whole bonus LP from the brilliant young Brian Runnett.
Issued between 1964 and 1971, EMI’s Great Cathedral Organ Series provides snapshots across 19 LPs of organs, organists and organ music in late 1960s Britain. Forty years on, it has achieved something close to iconic status and is ripe for CD. Now here they are, all those records, collected together for the first time, in a commodious cube with bonus tracks (and indeed a bonus LP).
In picking off the major cathedrals and their incumbent organists one by one, the producer of GCOS, Brian B. Culverhouse, was also appealing to the collector’s instinct. Whether it be first-day covers, coronation memorabilia or beer mats, the British are avid collectors, especially when items are numbered or have a limited shelf-life. In this case, EMI could count on a core of well-defined enthusiasts who found the novelty of the stereo gramophone chimed happily with their passion for Solo tubas.
The object of the notes that follow is not to take in every work, but rather to elaborate on aspects of the collection that are striking, distinctive, surprising or even epoch-making; I hope that the reader, general music-lover and organ aficionado alike, will find the result at the very least informative. Two of the youngest organists here, Simon Preston and Brian Runnett, did not feature in GCOS. I treat their contributions, and the other tracks added from EMI’s bounty, as if they were part of the series.
The Players
The founding of the St Albans International Organ Festival in 1963 by Peter Hurford helped to usher in a new era for organists, both in the UK and abroad. The festival competition in particular promoted the organ as concert instrument rather than liturgical ornament, and from the beginning, prizewinners such as Susan Landale, Gillian Weir and the late David Sanger were enabled to pursue careers as international concert artists rather than being tied to a church post. That is not to say that some of the most outstanding players of the day did not still gravitate initially towards cathedral appointments. Here we find Nicolas Kynaston – just 26, and easily the youngest organist of the series – at Westminster Cathedral (significantly, perhaps, his is the only LP photo to show the artist in concert dress) and Simon Preston in his first stint at Westminster Abbey, as assistant to Douglas Guest: both later went on to pursue brilliant concert careers.
More typically, organists would achieve a prominent cathedral position and hold it until retirement. At the time of these recordings, Conrad Eden had been in post for 30 years, Herbert Sumsion for 37, and Heathcote Statham for 39. Most of the organists featured, however, were in mid-career; of those, at least five – Herrick Bunney, Melville Cook, Guest, Francis Jackson and Philip Marshall – had returned from service in World War II to pick up where they had left off. There are some remarkable and brilliant performances from career cathedral organists, for example Bunney, Cook, Jackson, Noel Rawsthorne and Christopher Robinson, all of whom exhibit prodigious techniques; and Brian Runnett’s 1967 recording shows what a consummate artist he already was before his life was tragically cut short in 1970. Some players of more advanced years are perhaps not as nimble as they would have been in their youth. Nevertheless, they often bring a palpable authenticity to a particular work and an intimate knowledge of their ‘home’ organ and its secrets.
The Music
The series included all six Mendelssohn sonatas, nine Bach performances (though mostly not of major pieces), six of the larger works of Franck, and a few other central pillars of the organ repertoire, not least Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on BACH (CD 3 14–15) and Reubke’s Sonata on the 94th Psalm (12 9–11). Most of the programmes present a mixed bouquet of repertoire gathered from a variety of musical periods and national traditions and usually calculated to show off as many sounds as possible in about 50 minutes (each side of an LP could accommodate 25 minutes or so). This scattergun approach was normal for most showcase organ recordings in the UK and remains popular on record and in recital today, whereas chamber-music, piano and orchestral recordings have tended to feature one composer or perhaps two or more (musically) related composers.
The different approaches are easily understood. Every large cathedral organ has its own character while at the same time boasting an abundance of unique colours: both are important factors in the choice of music. Notwithstanding this, some players took the opportunity to concentrate on a particular repertoire: for example, English Romantic music (Sumsion and Marshall), north European Baroque (Lepine), 19th- and 20th-century French (Wills and Kynaston), contemporary English (Wicks) and German Romantic (Fisher and Runnett). French and English contemporary works feature prominently. Highlights of the former are the Toccata from Duruflé’s Suite Op.5 (Rawsthorne, 1 9) and his Prélude et Fugue sur le nom d’Alain (Cook, 7 1–2), Langlais’ Te Deum (Lepine, 4 3), Alain’s ‘Jardin suspendu’ and ‘Litanies’ (Bunney, 5 1–2), and Messiaen’s ‘Combat de la Mort et de la Vie’ (Kynaston, 9 11); of the latter, Jackson playing his own Diversion for Mixtures (1 15), Mathias’s Variations on a Hymn Tune (Joyce, 5 18–24) and his Partita (Robinson, 9 6–8), and Ridout’s Seven Last Words (Wicks, 10 9–15).
A point that Brian Culverhouse makes above about the series is that he would try to include music which had some association with the performer (and/or the instrument/building). Alongside Sumsion in S. S. Wesley, Elgar and Howells (3 1–7), Jackson (1 15) – who begins with James Nares (1 10–11), mid-18th-century organist of York Minster – Wills (8 22–23) and Statham (7 11) play their own compositions; Joyce is playing Mathias’s Op.20 variations at the organ on which he had given their 1962 (broadcast) première; and Eden was dedicatee of Arthur Milner’s prelude (6 4) while Vierne’s Carillon de Westminster (9 12) is dedicated to the builder of the organ on which Kynaston plays it.
The Instruments
The prime importance of documentary reissues of organ recordings is that they preserve and characterise each instrument at a particular moment in its development. Thus the GCOS recording was particularly well timed in the case of Exeter, which was altered immediately afterwards (conversely, the Chester and Canterbury recordings followed hard on the heels of major rebuilds). The history of organ-building is one of gradual but incessant renewal, as components wear out, fashions change and requirements alter. Cathedral organs have several roles: to accompany refined singing in the choir, support robust singing in the nave, and function as concert instruments. An overview of the 19 organs featured in GCOS, including key developments before and after, is given in Table 1. It shows how much organ-building in the cathedrals of Britain in the second half of the 19th century was dominated by Henry Willis (‘Father’) & Sons (Gloucester, Exeter, Durham, Salisbury, Hereford, Canterbury, St Paul’s, Lincoln), while during the first half of the 20th, though Willis secured two major contracts (Liverpool, Westminster Cathedral), Harrison & Harrison (H&H) was in the ascendant (York, Westminster Abbey, Durham, Ely, Worcester).
The second half of the 20th century saw the continued rise of H&H as the dominant force (Exeter, Hereford, Salisbury, Ely, Lincoln), though Hill, Norman & Beard (Llandaff, Norwich), N. P. Mander (Canterbury, St Paul’s), J. W. Walker & Sons (York) and Rushworth & Dreaper (Chester) made some headway. Three organs in the series have since been entirely replaced: that of St Giles’ by Rieger, the Austrian builder, those at Llandaff and Worcester by a re-emergent Nicholson & Co.; one, Gloucester, has been changed out of all recognition, beginning with its second rebuild (1971), where the consultant, Ralph Downes, was said to have ‘removed all traces of the romantic instrument’. All the others have undergone modifications that have altered their character to a greater or lesser extent.
And what is the prevailing sound on these records? Predominantly, it is typical of prestigious British organs of the time, and reflective of early 20th-century taste: heavily leathered diapasons in profusion, chorus reeds on high wind-pressures, a vast array of orchestral colour stops and the inevitable battery of tubas. Reviewing Christopher Dearnley’s second LP, from St Paul’s, Stanley Webb perceptively noted: ‘Although our continental friends tell us that what we really ought to admire is the spiky classical organ with its keen clear tones, our insular ears continue to hanker after the rich pealing sound of the English cathedral organ, with solid diapason choruses capped with high pressure reeds, plus a lavish palette of imitative stops’ (Gramophone, May 1970; all the review quotations that follow are from that magazine unless otherwise stated). Many of the organs heard here are entirely innocent of those organ-reform elements – such as mutation stops, high-ranking mixtures, short-resonator reeds and independent pedal upperwork – that would soon became fashionable. It is notable that the more recent organs such as St Giles’ (1940–41), Llandaff (1958) and Chester (rebuilt and revoiced 1969–70) that had already enthusiastically embraced such elements tend to betray a rather brash, unyielding sound.
The newest organ in the series was Coventry, which was built by H&H in 1962 for Basil Spence’s post-war cathedral. Its ultra-modern scheme had been drawn up by Sidney Campbell in conjunction with Cuthbert Harrison. They were clearly influenced by Ralph Downes’s controversial specification for the 1954 organ at the Royal Festival Hall, London (also H&H), which had broken new ground to the extent of drawing hostility from the musical establishment. Felix Aprahamian characterised Coventry thus: ‘Roaring pedal and bright manual reeds, a homely diapason chorus and even scintillating mutations – all take part in the parade. And there’s reverberation that sets the loud final chords rolling round the building’ (July 1965).
Quite early on, it had been intended to limit GCOS to 12 LPs: clearly the series as it ran exceeded expectations. Nonetheless, by 1971 it seems to have run out of steam, so not just Peterborough but important organs such as Truro, Ripon and St Albans are missing from the pantheon. The 19 organs that made it are more than enough, however, to give a rounded portrait of a prevailing sound: high Romantic, with a whiff of lost empire, and emergent hints of a classical past.