Magnus Williamson, Professor of Early Music at Newcastle University, presents a film on Tudor organs and organ music, featuring the Wetheringsett organ built in 2002 by Goezte & Gwynn.

Graham Barber performs and discusses the organ music of organist and composer Francis Jackson, born in 1917.

Tom Bell introduces the organ music of two English composers for organ who lived hundreds of years apart: Orlando Gibbons, and contemporary composer Alan Gibbs.

Like any cultural or technological artefact, the organ represents its time and the people who built it. A new feature length documentary by Fugue State Films traces the history and development of the organ and its music from c1550 to the present.

The RCO’s Wingfield Organ is now in residence at St Mary’s Church in Fotheringhay – all very appropriate, as both instrument and church are fascinating medieval survivors. Fotheringhay will be the setting for a special concert on Saturday 25 May exploring the vocal and organ music of late medieval England, with David Skinner and The Alamire Scholars, organist James Parsons, and historian Dr David Starkey providing the spoken narrative.

The sound of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge has become fixed in the public consciousness as the quintessence of English cathedral singing: epitomised by The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols each December. However the assumption that this singing style continues a tradition inherited from the Middle Ages could hardly be further from the truth. It took a revolution in social and musical attitudes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for the “terrible roughness” of cathedral singing up to then to be transformed, as Timothy Day shows in his book I Saw Eternity the Other Night – King’s College Cambridge and an English Singing Style, just published by Allen Lane.

The year 1976 brought the 25th Anniversary of the opening of the Royal Festival Hall, and to celebrate this the BBC commissioned a 20-minute work from Peter Racine Fricker for a concert of English music. Fricker chose to write a short single movement symphony, and as an FRCO, he decided to include an organ part. Gillian Weir was invited to be the soloist, and in this article from the RCO Journal of 2017 she describes the event, and also discusses the performance of a later concerto by Fricker, Laudi Concertati, which was dedicated to her.

One hundred years ago, Harold Darke (1888-1976) began his fifty-year stint as Director of Music at St. Michael’s Cornhill, in the City of London. The church is celebrating this event all through October, and James McVinnie will open with an all-Bach recital in tribute to Darke on Monday 3rd October.

Philip Moore’s new Requiem will be given its world premiere on Friday 18 November 2016 at 2pm at St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge in a concert to be given by the BBC Singers, conducted by David Hill. The concert will also be broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
Dedicated to the memory of his Mother and Father, Philip Moore’s Requiem is written for soprano solo, mixed voices and organ.