Watch the College’s 2023 Conferment of Diplomas Ceremony here, in full, or as edited highlights, and download the programme, along with the full texts of the speeches and citations.

Tom Winpenny has recorded much of Francis Pott’s music, and this richly illustrated article on the organ works of Francis Pott is filled with an interpreter’s insights. Pott’s compositions are ‘revelatory creations of intellectual rigour and profound humanity,’ says Winpenny, and in his commentary and music examples we become absorbed in Pott’s preoccupations and motivations.

In ‘Michael Tippett’s shorter choral music: some personal reflections’, Nicholas Cleobury has distilled his work on, and with, Tippett over many years into an engaging commentary on some wonderful but often forgotten music.

Marking the 450th anniversary of Thomas Tomkins’s birth, John Caldwell investigates this ‘honest quiet peaceable man’ as one contemporaneous document characterised him. The focus of Caldwell’s study is the keyboard music, and not least how Tomkins reacted to the idioms and techniques he discovered in an important English sixteenth-century manuscript which came into his possession.

Terence Charlston looks at recent editions from the newly founded publisher Lyrebird Music.  In this review article he not only reacts to the editorial mission and accomplishment but also stimulates our engagement as keyboard players with the interpretative challenges of the virginalist repertoire.

A gallery of pictures from the College’s annual Conferment Ceremony at Southwark Cathedral on Saturday 4 March, at which RCO President David Hill presented successful examination candidates with their awards and diplomas, and presented four RCO Medals.

There’s a powerful astrological theme to Martin Baker’s organ recital at St Michael’s Cornhill on Monday 13 March, as he gives the world premiere of Jonathan Hagger’s Great Conjunction Triptych: Seven Vignettes for Organ.

The RCO was delighted to present Professor Suzuki Masaaki with the RCO Medal at a masterclass for Royal Academy of Music organ students in London this January.

Copies of the College’s magazine for members from April 2007 to January 2020 can be downloaded here as pdfs.