The British organ world emerged, blinking slightly, into the media spotlight last week. The inauguration of the restored Royal Festival Hall organ, with the Opening Gala, has kicked off a fortnight’s residency of BBC Radio3 at the Hall itself, focussing on the Pull Out All The Stops Festival, and numerous outreach events – hats off to the Southbank PR department, who are really doing the organ and organists proud.
As most organists can talk the hind leg off a donkey given even half a chance, there has been no shortage of articulate media interviews, recital promotions, and print articles, once the opportunity was presented. (Let’s keep it up.)
I’m going to sound rather schoolgirlish, but I must say that the opening bars of the concert, the mighty first chords of the Gigout Grand choeur dialogue, were absolutely thrilling. The rest was a merry mixture of true organ pieces, arrangements, musical celebrities and choral+organ. Andrew Clements writing in the Guardian was a bit sniffy, along with others who felt the organ was being treated as a circus act. Never mind, folks – proper organ recitals start in September, with Jennifer Bate opening the 2013-14 series.
Perhaps the highest media accolade of the week came from the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs programme, Newsnight, which commissioned Festival Organ Scholar Weston Jennings to play the programme out with the theme tune on the RFH organ – Weston notated the music from scratch as the original didn’t exist in sheet music form. Here it is on YouTube (thanks @OrganistsReview for posting it on Twitter):
By the way I was wrong in my previous post that the frontispiece of dummy pipes, designed by the Hall’s deputy architect Leslie Martin, had been left off in the rebuild. That was the original idea – but there was a change of plan and it’s been reinstated – see below. I still think it looks false – but I suppose it has historical significance and should be kept.
So the dummy pipes are those at the very front. All others are genuine pipes? Very interesting article!
You can sort of tell that the dummy pipes were the idea of an architect, and not an organist or organ builder! But yes, all the other pipes are working ranks.
I did hear from a couple of sources that some of the original wooden dummy pipes got demolished and others taken as keepsakes in the rebuilding, – this before the decision to keep the display. If this was true then replacements obviously had to be made. I also heard that the original ones had no proper back on them, just straps to hold the shape.