In this film Franck and Performance Practice on the Organ, Joris Verdin demonstrates how to play Franck’s music in a historically informed manner.

A recorded conversation between RCO President David Hill and Dame Gillian Weir, originally presented during the Cambridge Summer Music Festival 2022.  Dame Gillian discusses her distinguished career as a concert organist and recording artist, illustrated with extracts from her various recordings. 

Jeremiah Stephenson shares ideas on how to practise improvisation and develop the keyboard harmony reflexes to improvise on hymn tunes. 

In this video, Gerard Brooks presents an illustrated survey of French and Belgian organ repertoire from the nineteenth century and suggests ways to expand your repertoire with pieces of various standards of difficulty by both familiar and unfamiliar composers.

David Pipe explores the musical styles which are part of the weekly repertoire of Catholic church musicians, with advice on accompanying responsorial psalms, hymns, and worship songs.

Andrew Cantrill-Fenwick draws on eight different periods and styles of music to suggest ways to build up an idiomatic improvisation.  The techniques he suggests are in a range of of difficulty, from possible hymn extensions to improvisation for the FRCO diploma examination.

Nicholas Cleobury gives an introduction to preparing one of Bach’s best known cantatas, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140, for performance with an orchestra.

The RCO sees the commissioning of new works for the organ as one of its priorities, and we look at recent additions to the organ repertoire commissioned by the RCO from contemporary composers.

A talk on Spanish and Portuguese organ music in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, written and presented by Martin Schmeding. This is the set history period for ARCO written papers, 2 July 2022-January 2023.