The Corporation of the City of London commissioned an inspired gift for HM The Queen for her Diamond Jubilee this year – an organ, which is temporarily installed in The Mansion House, the home of the Lord Mayor of London*. The present Lord Mayor, Roger Gifford, welcomed us to ‘one of the few working palaces in England’ as he put it, for a short recital on the organ. Henry Fairs, Head of Organ Studies at Birmingham Conservatoire, put this little organ through its paces, and very fine it sounded. It was made in the Mander Organs workshops in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London, and will eventually live in Westminster Abbey. Henry’s recital included JS Bach, Scheidemann and William Russell. He accompanied a Fancy by Thomas Tomkins with the Nightingale stop, complete with revolving tweety-birds which pop out of the top of the case – though a few minutes of this was quite enough.
Henry Fairs is one of our tutors on the course, and also a very busy recitalist. You can see his forthcoming recital diary on his website here.
picture: The Mander 2013 organ, a gift for The Queen. The design is based loosely on case designs of 18th century English chamber organs, but that is where any similarity to such instruments ceases, as it has been designed to fit its final home in Westminster Abbey. The front pipes are gilded with French red gold leaf.
*The Lord Mayor of London is an ancient office of the City of London (once genuinely held by Dick Whittington), and not to be confused with the Mayor of London (currently Boris Johnson) who has power over Greater London.
