The Battle of the Organs

Guest blogger, Daniel Potts, found delicious music and a real sense of fun at the Battle of the Organs, Leeds Parish Church on 13th June.

For those more mature generations liberated from post-war austerity by the promise, optimism and ‘white heat’ of the 1960’s, an ecclesiastical setting can dampen such spirit. Severe connotations of divine retribution personified by cane-wielding, repressed school-marms etc. seems to have resulted in general and self-perpetuating absence from church services for many members of such generations. Yet they predominated the audience gathered in Leeds Parish Church on Wednesday 13^th June for ‘The Battle of the Organs’.

Why? For one, the music was delicious: for the variety evident in the programme; the rarity of the instrumentation; and, the measured precision of the execution exhibited in many of the pieces by the resident organists of Leeds Parish Church and Liverpool Cathedral. But, add to this the lightness and charm with which the concert itself and the individual pieces were introduced, and you have the full answer. A duo of boy choristers alternated jocular sentences for the general introduction to ‘Battle of the Organs’, in which titular spirit they closed their speech in unison with the phrase “Bring it on!” Thus, the tone was set for the evening and continued by the gentleman whose involvement with the concert series at Leeds Parish Church – he is the organist there – explains its high reputation, as evinced by the considerable turn-out, baby-boomers and the rest. This is Dr. Simon Lindley. The organ music was punctuated with intriguing tit-bits of contextual information, full of dry wit, delivered with Donnish eloquence in an Oxonian brogue with Leodesian inflections. This highly amusing lightness was key the success of the evening.

Four organs were played in various permutations by six organists. In keeping with the spirit of lightness all four opened the musical programme with Rawthorne’s ‘Hornpipe Humoresque’ Here the hornpipe vied for domination with Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, Arne’s ‘Rule Brittania’ and Widor’s ‘Organ Concerto’ and was found to elicit guffaws with the comic use of unexpected chromatic shifts. All four organs were used later with an equally recognisable arrangement of Handel’s ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’. During this piece a life-size, cardboard cut-out of Her Majesty the Queen appeared on a balcony above, compounding the sense of fun. A Handel-Bach pastiche by Harold Heeremans – ‘Aria in the Style of Handel and Bach’ – made an appearance in the second part of the concert. This was quite reminiscent of ‘Ombra mai fu’ and perhaps ‘Mache dich mein Herze rein’. Aria-like was Massenet’s ‘Le dernier sommeil de la Vierge’- a musical description of the Blessed Virgin. Here the aria-like qualities were operatic in style; and opera was solidly represented in this varied tour with an arrangement of Verdi’s overture to Nabucco. The arresting contrasts of the overture, along with highly recognisable foray into ‘Va pensiero’, were heightened with the use of a big screen visual display on which was shown the detailed synchronised intricacy of the organist at work. Where the ear is accustomed to hearing the orchestral arrangement of the piece, the use of the organ lent the overture a certain anodyne modesty that was exceedingly charming. A similar sense was evoked by the Malcolm Riley arrangement of Percy Whitlock’s ‘Elegy’. Whitlock appeared again in the second half with two movements: ‘Lantana’ and ‘Toccata’. The toccata delighted the Musos for the musical complexity and rapidity of the execution; as did Hurford’s ‘Dialogue No.1’, where two organs were in conversation, speaking major-minor shifts in the double language of bitonality.

Two pieces stood out from the rest. Louis Vierne’s ‘Les Cloches de Hinckley’ and Otterino Respighi’s ‘The Appian Way’. In the Vierne, performed by Simon Lindley, the ‘cloches’, or bells, could be heard pealing through the organ music at first disjointedly and then regularly as church bells are wont to do. The peal was repeated throughout the piece and varied with modulations, culminating in a great sense of profundity. At one point in the piece the appropriate upper partials of the ‘bells’ were heard, evoking either bell-ringing practise or, perhaps, a wedding. This was conveyed with remarkable measured precision. The same can be said of the Otterino, performed by Professor Ian Tracey. A pulsating, regular, repeated figure conjuring up the marching feet of Roman legions, built with chromatic, discordant tension to the ultimate, throbbing climax. The tension was palpable as though before battle. This was imparted by Ian Tracey, with masterly grace, measure and restraint. Both performances were viewed on the big screen via which the music was heightened by the displays of dexterity.

Before we were invited to sing Parry’s setting of ‘Jerusalem’, in keeping with the sense of lightness, the Edward Marsh arrangement of Barry Gray’s ‘Thunderbirds March’ rang out from all four organs with the addition of percussion. In the same spirit, this was preceded humorously by a vocal, spoken ‘Geographical Fugue’ by Ernst Toch. Audience participation in both pieces continued the lightness to the close of the concert. The inclusion of popular and light works in the programme is to be lauded, not only because it is great music, but because it attracts a wider audience to other great, but less well-known pieces such as ‘Les Cloches de Hinckley’ and ‘the Appian Way’. Including the popular and light works is an advance on outdated views on what is ‘high’ and ‘low’ in Western music. Such views are based on false notions of authenticity in music, which exist as a consequence of feelings we have inherited about the commodification of culture that accompanied the industrial revolution in the 19^th century. The fun and joy of the evening has certainly secured the future concert attendance of at least one audience member, whose inherited reluctance to even enter a church has been largely nullified.