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.

Our twice-yearly print publication, RCO News, contains a new series.  We’ve asked younger members of the College to give us their perspective on learning the organ, and tell us of their concerns as they develop their skills and careers as musicians in the twenty-first century, and teenage organist Anna Hallett has written the first article for us.

Gerard Brooks gives a brief survey of the organ works of Camille Saint-Saens, and describes what made him different from other organist-composers of his time.

Sir Herbert Brewer (1865–1928) was Organist of Gloucester Cathedral from 1896 until his death, and Simon Carpenter’s recent research for a University of Gloucestershire MA (from which this article is derived) examined his place in British music history, his educational philosophy, and the effect he had on the careers of his teenage articled pupils. The […]

In a welcome re-balancing of the customary recital series, the line-up for the John Hill Organ Series at St Lawrence Jewry, London, which has just begun, is composed solely of female organists.  It coincides with the launch earlier this year of the Society of Women Organists in the UK, an organisation dedicated to promoting women in the organ world, and recruiting girls and women to study the organ.

Go with organist colleagues to an organ recital at the Royal Festival Hall, and sooner or later someone will strike up a nostalgic lament for Wednesdays at 5.55. Harry Hoyle has just published a history of this extraordinary series of weekly organ recitals on the RFH organ, which lasted for 34 years. His engaging account will interest both organists and anyone fascinated by the social history of classical music performance in the second half of the twentieth century.

John Varley Roberts remains one of the less well-remembered church organists of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. And yet his influence, especially as a choir trainer, was both considerable and enduring at a time when organ and choral music in the Anglican Church was undergoing a significant transformation. This study – part of a bigger piece of work on Roberts – considers his attitude to the organ.

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.

Sir George Thomas Smart (1776–1867) is not as well known to the general musical public as he should be, not least because he was the first British musician to wield a baton over his forces and the first to take sole charge of a musical performance. The famous and misleading quote in the title is one of the most widely known anecdotes from his life, but this humorous aside does not reflect Smart’s attitude to the organ and its music in 1851, nor his reforming zeal.