James Parsons is teaching us in Oxford this week, and even persuaded us today that transposition and harmonisation at sight were great fun – well almost. He’s an enormously busy recitalist and teacher – organ tutor at the Birmingham Conservatoire and the RCO Academy Organ School, and Head of Student Development for the Royal College of Organists. As soon as our course is over he’s running Set Your Sights! – an inspirational course giving teenage organists a taste of the organ scholar experience. (More details at the bottom of the page.) Inamongst he has managed to fit in an interview for the blog – and here are his answers to my five questions:
Which piece of music are you studying at the moment and why?
César Franck’s Prière—dusky, musky and hauntingly captivating—vying, in my view, for ‘Franck’s best piece’ with his Fantaisie-idylle in A. I’ve long been aware of this alluring music, with its Wagnerian harmonic landscape, and have ‘hacked through’ it in private many times in the past, though back-burnering it as a shrine to visit with due observance in the future. An encounter to one of Cavaillé-Coll’s three finest, happily unaltered, instruments last summer—that at St Étienne in Caen—alerted me that years are just slipping by and the time for learning Priére (that’s just ‘fingering’, yer know!) had come: had just been ravished by those fonds! But how did Franck really stretch those huge chords and play legato, well-endowed though we know he was! Not prepared to discuss my own endowments on your blog, Morwenna, but am enjoying devising ‘ways and means’! Happily, this week based in Oxford and with some free time between classes, I can spend time practising at my own College, Exeter, where I was Organ Scholar way back in the last Millennium—and gain surrogate inspiration from the faux-Cavaillé in our Sainte-Chapelle-inspired College shrine. A senior moment, of sorts!!
What has been your best experience as an organist?
Recently—the warmth of reception and huge audiences I experienced for two recitals I gave in Russia (Moscow RC Cathedral, and Kazan Conservatorium): sincere emotional response coupled with perceptive critique.
What has been your worst experience as an organist?
Oh—the start of the Albinoni Adagio—programmed at Oundle international Festival with strings under the baton of a mature conductor/ pianist/ broadcaster delivering his downbeat without reference to the monitor to verify I’d reached the console.
What’s the best piece of advice you were given by an organ teacher? (and who was it?)
“Mind your back” (the late, great George Miles—my second ever lesson at the age of 10) – referring, I think, to the importance of good posture at the console! George deserves much greater recognition for his enlightenment back in the 1950s to ’80s, for his accomplished playing, and his hugely prescient influence as a teacher. (For more on George Miles see George Miles WikipediaWikipedia.)
What would be your own best piece of advice for student organists?
Learn oodles of repertoire as soon as you can (but properly—that’s just ‘fingering’, yer know!) The younger you are when you engage with new pieces the more deeply they’ll settle.
SET YOUR SIGHTS! based in Merton College this Saturday 12th April, gives teenage organists a taste of what it is like being an organ scholar: playing the organ, singing, and directing a choir. Tutors this year alongside James are Margaret Phillips, Professor of Organ at the Royal College of Music, and one of today’s foremost recording artists, and Jeremy Summerley, Sterndale Bennett Lecturer in Music at the Royal Academy of Music, and a renowned choral conductor on the national stage. Students will sing, conduct and play the organ in a service of Choral Evensong at the end of the day (5pm in Merton College Chapel) which is open to all. For future courses keep an eye on the events page, or the RCO website.
