One of the more pleasurable of New Year resolutions is to decide to expand our repertoire and learn new pieces, and there’s help here on iRCO, with no fewer than ten short videos on organ repertoire, presented by experts in their field. Each one provides inspiration on a different century, or a different musical culture, with advice on appropriate registration, style and performance.

The RCO runs study trips abroad – a splendid opportunity to play organ repertoire on the instruments for which it was written. Robbie Carroll went on a recent RCO study trip to Germany, playing Brahms, Reger and Reubke on organs in Berlin, Leipzig and Merseburg. He sent us this personal account of the trip.

Thierry Escaich’s compositional work is recognised the world over, and in acknowledgement of this he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France in 2013. He is the only composer of international stature today whose output contains a substantial place for the organ.

David Maw analyses Escaich’s writing for the organ in detail, with examples, in this article which originally appeared in the RCO Journal for 2017. Maw discusses Escaich’s creation of genres of writing of his own invention, along with the traditional concerto form; his use of improvisation and historical allusion; and his assimilation of an unusually wide range of musical material – from folksongs to note-rows, from triads to seemingly atonal chords – without any compromise to the compositional voice.

In this RHS-RCO Masterclass, Matthew Martin discusses the practicalities of performance of the French Classical Repertoire – from registration and articulation, to the fingering for ornamentation and the application of inègale.

Ten years ago Will Fraser spotted a market for recordings of keyboard instruments, using the global reach of the internet to find their niche market. “I wanted to produce films that you can’t find on television, knowing there was an audience which would react when word of them arrived on the web. And out of that, Fugue State Films was born.” He talks about the challenges of fundraising and filming Fugue State’s acclaimed organ series, especially the recently released box set on Max Reger, their biggest project so far.

Max Reger’s great first compositional period ended with his Second Sonata for Organ, Opus 60, written in 1901 at the time of his move from Weiden to Munich. It is a good introduction to his work, because it is concise, but has a lot of variation of form and technique.

On his move to Munich in 1901, Max Reger’s music, even by his standards, became more involved and difficult, and the signature work from this time is his set of variations on a theme by Bach, one of six great sets of variations he wrote. This work was written for piano, but conductor Ira Levin, using Reger’s own orchestration of his Beethoven Variations as an inspiration, has orchestrated the work.

This documentary film attempts to prise open Reger’s music, to equate it with his biography and the context of his life, and to combine discussion of his music with footage of performers playing excerpts from major works in many forms – lieder, orchestral and instrumental works, and the organ music from his great Weiden period of 1898 to 1901.

Richard Brasier discusses the performance of the organ music of the Classical period: repertoire between the Baroque and Romantic that is often neglected.