The clear division of Bach’s keyboard works into those for organ and those for clavier is one that is more evident to modern editors than it probably was to performers in eighteenth-century Germany.  Francis Knights discusses a few works that appear to fall into neither camp, and the evidence they provide for the particular instrument they may have been played on.

Tom Bell uses W. T. Best’s editions of Bach to open a window into the world of a Victorian musician, and to explore nineteenth-century performance practice. 

John Scott Whiteley discusses the playing of ornaments in Bach, with a performance of Erbarm dich mein, O Herr Gott, BWV 721, on the organ of the Wenzelskirche, Naumburg.

Anna Lapwood discusses three very different but engaging pieces by Bach, which will enrich your repertoire and stretch your technique.

A series of webinars, presented by Frederick Stocken, covering the Bach chorale question from the CRCO Diploma examination written paper.

Writing in 1784–5 in his Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst, Carl Friedrich Daniel Schubart(1739–91) stated, with reference to the Sechs Trio für die Orgel mit dem obligaten Pedale: ‘Playing these [sonatas] … is the preserve of great masters; they are so difficult that there are scarcely two or three people living in Germany who […]

In this article from the RCO Journal of 2017, John Scott Whiteley examines Bach’s selection of traditional hymns for the Orgelbuchlein, and the tensions between Pietism, a Protestant renewal movement, and Lutheran Orthodoxy, in his sources.

Tom Wilkinson considers the surviving early keyboard works of J S Bach, and suggests that his codification of tonal harmony, and his ability to employ it at the service of structure, began back in his teenage years.

Professor Peter Williams, Bach Scholar and a Vice President of the RCO, has passed away, appropriately around midnight just before Bach’s birthday, the 21st March. Official tributes will of course be paid elsewhere, but I would like to remember a study day which I attended as a very newbie organist, in which his sharp, questioning intelligence, combined with great authority, were powerfully in evidence.