UR TV CAST

In interview he came across as an articulate, arrogant boy (he’s 23) who knew he wound people up (“I get punched a lot”) but so what?
These days, he wants to be seen as fragile, sensitive and vulnerable and signs of growth are all over the band’s sublime new LP where any barbs are directed mostly at himself. Which is why she has called the series “The Personal Touch”.Each player is free to include any kind of music playable on the instrument at St Andrew’s – which, as a two-manual organ of relatively modest scope, has its limitations – but each has also been asked to include something recent, preferably by a composer whom the organist knows personally.Perhaps the most striking example is the programme offered by Patrick Russill in the last recital on 26 November. Russill, organist at Brompton Oratory and head of the church music course at the Royal Academy of Music, intersperses the sharply focused Baroque music of Francois Couperin’s Messe pour les Couvents with the lusher, splashier sounds of Francis Grier’s Te Deum, which breaks up into sections, like the canticle it’s based on.David Gammie, on 22 October, promises a rich blow-out of Romantic music, including a Prelude and Fugue by Franz Schmidt and more recent pieces by Dick Koomans and Peter Lawson.Martin Baker, currently in charge of music at Westminster Abbey, includes not only pieces by Dan Lockair and the American Pamela Decker, but also his own improvisation He declined Ennis’s suggestion to write it down beforehand He is fiery, dynamic and above all, a “live” player. Anne Page, who moved from Australia nearly 20 years ago, lives in Cambridge and runs the city’s Summer Festival.One of the refreshing aspects of Catherine Ennis’s choice of players is that she has made neither youth nor formal appointments a qualification. Most important to her is each player’s ability “to make music at the organ”, which is not the same as the capacity to bring off brilliant performances of individual big works.And Ennis wants to show that the organ is not just a historical phenomenon; it is alive and kicking, with a constantly growing repertoire. Sarah Baldock, who plays on 29 October, was recently appointed assistant organist at Winchester Cathedral and is in charge of the new girls’ choir there.

He lost a home series to an England team that included Frank “Typhoon” Tyson. Nevertheless his appointment was confirmed for a tour of West Indies, with Miller as vice- captain, at a time when diplomacy was vital (bottles had been thrown at England in 1954).Johnson was the right man. It was her wide range of contacts and, as co-ordinator of an organ concert guide in London, her knowledge of who was playing what and where, that recommended her for the job.The point about sex is fair, because there are almost as many brilliant women organists today as there are men. Catherine Ennis has chosen three women out of her total of six players.

The first, Ann Elise Smoot, organist of St Luke’s Chelsea, has just won the biggest organ competition in the US, at Denver. Rather surprisingly, the second series, which starts on Thursday, has been chosen by a woman – who never took the college’s exams, although she is a brilliant player.Catherine Ennis is organist at St Lawrence Jewry, where she gives weekly recitals herself as well as inviting guest players. Eight years ago the College moved its headquarters to the spacious, rebuilt Wren church of St Andrew, Holborn, and dusted down its image. The exams are no doubt as demanding as ever, but the college now has a senior executive who is young, wears suits that are sharp enough to notice, and talks business in a purposeful way.
Last May the college also launched a series of public recitals at St Andrew’s, called “Young and Gifted”, as all the players were under 30 They were also all men. ONCE UPON a time there was a fanciful-looking Italianate building opposite the ticket office of the Royal Albert Hall in London. Behind its narrow, mullioned windows toiled Dickensian clerks in rusty suits, and within its gloomy chambers pallid young gentlemen and fewer young ladies submitted to examinations in which most were found wanting, at least the first time, and, in many cases, the umpteenth It was called The Royal College of Organists.

In spite of everything, “life is beautiful”, as Shostakovich himself said of his symphony.The link through Rostropovich directly to the composer and the great and terrible events that gave rise to this music made this performance a specially moving musical and human experience.Laurence Hughes. A release of tension – and a hint of hope for the future – but no facile optimism. A final tragic outburst preceded the circuitous approach to a final, hard-won, affirmatory major chord. There was a tangible sense of relief when a bassoon announced the final pastoral allegretto; here again the composer took an oblique approach to the problem of creating an adequate conclusion to such a nightmare vision by melodies and dance rhythms that somehow add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Piccolos shrilled, brass and woodwind struck a suitably festive note and an extraordinary gear-change into the final allegretto heralded the concluding fierce rejoicings – but always with sharpness and humour.
The other side of the coin was apparent in the great Eighth Symphony. Here was all the terror and pity of war that Shostakovich was so evidently trying to forget in the Ninth. The LSO responded magnificently to Rostropovich’s calm authority, maintained even in the most searing pages and fearsome climaxes of the opening adagio; the woodwind again distinguishing themselves in the cruelly high writing of the scherzo; brass and percussion were crushing in depicting a brutally insistent war-machine in the central march – “man deafened by the gigantic hammers of war”, as the composer put it.After the deadened sense of grief of the fourth movement, the reawakening of the lyrical impulse in the form of Shostakovich’s favourite solo piccolo as the voice of the human spirit rising above the darkness was almost painfully beautiful. Even here, though, a deep melancholy lurks beneath the surface, as brought out beautifully by the lonely clarinet and brooding strings of the LSO in the second movement, and the lugubrious bassoon in the largo.