Drew Cantrill-Fenwick found enthusiastic students and much to admire on a recent organ playing and teaching trip to Hong Kong.

‘The most brilliantly bonkers night out’, ORGANOKE is a sell-out evening of community singing, and has brought a new audience to the 1844 Bishop & Son organ at St Giles, Camberwell.

Engaging programming features in this year’s two BBC Proms organ concerts, with an international mix of performers and composers.

The aim of interNational Organ Day in April 2021 was to restore the organ in the public’s consciousness to its former position central to music making across the world. The celebrations went online with the onset of lockdown, and they can still be enjoyed via YouTube. Here’s how The Organ Show was born, with links to some notable highlights.

Performers from six European countries will come together in Westminster Cathedral on 20th November, to perform the UK premiere of Jean Guillou’s spectacular La Révolte des Orgues, a 25-minute piece for percussion, and no fewer than nine organs.  Some of the musicians have played La Révolte before, but not all, and rehearsal time is limited, starting on 17th November, when Viscount Organs will install seven digital instruments, to add to the Cathedral’s Apse and Grand pipe organs.

This year’s OrganFest in Cardiff is offering a perfect opportunity to introduce youngsters to the organ. David Pipe on the organ with John Biddle as narrator, along with Jeremy Sampson, curator of the WOOFYT, present all sorts of wizardry and magic in a concert for the whole family on the morning of Saturday, 7th September.

Art Night is a free, contemporary art festival, taking place over one night, once a year, in a different area of London.  This year the festival is on the night of Saturday 22nd June, in Walthamstow and King’s Cross in North London. Cory Archangel and Hampus Lindwall have been invited to create an event for the festival based around the organ at the church of St Mary, in Walthamstow.

The powerfully Gothic surroundings of James Cubitt’s Union Chapel in north London are the setting for the third Organ Reframed this October, where the 1877 Henry Willis organ will star in a festival designed to introduce new artists and new audiences to its versatility. Booking has opened for the only event of its kind in the UK: Organ Reframed focuses on commissioning new music from composers at the contemporary cutting edge to firmly embed a 19th century instrument in the music of the 21st century.

Those of us who attended the RCO/Cinema Organ Society Organ Day at the Troxy Cinema in London’s East End last January are aware of the skills of organists like Richard Hills FRCO – equally at home on the classical as well as the cinema organ. Now, a year on, another celebrated classical organist will step up to the Troxy Wurlitzer – Thomas Trotter gives his first concert on the cinema organ this coming January, in the company of Simon Gledhill. We look at the legacy of other crossover artists in the organ world.