OrganFest, the annual weekend celebration of the organ, moves north this year. After two years in the Midlands, it will be held in Edinburgh from Friday 28th to Sunday 30th October, and showcase organs by Willis, Ahrend, and Reiger.

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.

Daniel Moult’s third video on the playing styles for different organ schools covers the North German Praeludium and Fuga.

In this second video on playing styles, Daniel Moult discusses style and performance practice for the French Baroque school.

Edward Higginbottom discusses aspects of performance that can bring to life the repertory of French organists composed between c1650 and c1750 – the ‘French Classical School’ – in the light of the aesthetic theory of the time.  In particular he discusses how the job of the organist of the time was to express the omitted […]

For musicians and composers who could afford to travel in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Leipzig became a focus of pilgrimage.  As a leading centre for enlightened music publishing, with its association with Bach and Mendelssohn, not to mention having one of the finest opera houses in Germany, it attracted composers in search of […]

Margaret Phillips describes how she approached a truly unique recital challenge – performing the complete organ works of Bach in recital, not once but twice, and on two instruments of very different size and style.

Kauffmann’s Harmonische Seelenlust was published in instalments through subscription from 1733 until 1740. It contains 98 preludes on 63 chorales, and 66 figured chorales, which are embellished with interludes and flourishes between phrases; six preludes have an obbligato part for oboe. Kauffmann gives detailed directions for registration, tempi, phrasing, articulation, and expressive ‘affect’ to a […]