In February 1924 the
Year Book Press issued "A Little
Organ Book in memory of Hubert Parry"
with the following note:
At Sir Hubert Parry’s
funeral in St. Paul’s Cathedral
on October 16th 1918,
a few of his friends made a small
wreath of melodies, which were woven
together and played. The pieces
in this Book have been written and
given by these friends and a few
besides, as a rather larger wreath,
in loving memory of him. The title
of the book was suggested by the
original heading on his own piece
(which stands as the first of them),
"For the Little Organ Book".
I have known this volume
since my schooldays – my teacher was
fond of Parry’s own piece but I don’t
remember her playing any of the others
and indeed until this disc arrived I
had never heard any of them except by
courtesy of my own efforts. In spite
of the overall elegiac tone imposed
by the occasion the book makes an attractive
sequence, for the pieces are individually
of good quality and offer a useful cross-section
of the composers who were writing for
organ in Georgian England. Many of the
names here will be familiar to readers
of the biography of Elgar; the Three
Choirs Festival is something of a leitmotif
in the careers of many of them, so the
choice of Hereford as a venue could
not be more apt.
Not all the high and
low points are where one would expect.
Parry’s own piece is charming if hardly
profound, and the working out is perfunctory.
Parry’s organ music is mostly on a large
scale (and usually magnificent); the
title of this brief movement suggests
that he had in mind to compose a book
of brief introductory voluntaries in
the manner of S.S. Wesley, but he got
no further with the project.
Stanford was devoted
to Parry although for temperamental
reasons they were destined to cross
swords to the bitter end. This brief
improvisation on one of Parry’s earliest
published songs parades all that is
weakest in late Stanford, principally
a tendency to use fidgety modulations
and augmented note-values as a prop
for failing inspiration. The Stanford
we love shines forth fitfully towards
the end, but the master’s voice is heard
more potently through his favourite
pupil Charles Wood, whose Andante sounds
at the beginning almost too Stanfordian
to be true.
Gray, Macpherson, Alcock
and Ley fall gratefully upon the ear
without leaving an abiding impression,
but Brewer’s "Carillon" and
Atkins’s prelude on "Worcester"
are made of sterner stuff while Walford
Davies offers some wafting, almost French-sounding
harmonies. On this showing Darke and,
to a lesser extent, Thalben-Ball belong
to those pastoralists to whom belongs
also Alec Rowley and of whom Gerald
Finzi was the supreme poetic voice,
genuine artists who could speak of the
transience of life, their idyllic landscapes
ever threatened by the chill of a passing
black cloud. The most remarkable piece,
however, is that by Bridge, full of
his characteristic bitter-sweet harmonies
and sounding decidedly modern in this
context.
The remainder of the
disc is dedicated to collections of
pieces by the two composers who, together
with Parry, were surely the major figures
present in the "Little Organ Book".
In all his period as an active organist
(some twenty years from his arrival
in Cambridge to his resignation from
Trinity College in 1892) Stanford wrote,
as far as we know, only two pieces for
the instrument, an unpublished Chorale-Prelude
on "Jesu Dulcis Memoriae"
(now published by Cathedral Music) and
a Prelude and Fugue in E minor. Apparently
he preferred playing orchestral music,
which he transcribed at sight, rather
than music actually written for the
organ. With the turn of the century,
however, the market for his larger choral-orchestral
pieces was declining while good organ
music could always be sold. His by then
rusty skills as a performer stood him
in good stead and between 1894 and his
death in 1924 he amassed a considerable
production including five sonatas, several
large-scale recital pieces and a number
of sets of smaller voluntary-style works.
Of his two sets of Preludes and Postludes
(1907 and 1908) the most ubiquitous
single piece, at least on record, is
the last of the second set, but the
first set, recorded here, is perhaps
more inspired as a whole and generations
of organists have seized upon it gratefully
for service use. It is not music that
grabs you by the throat, as some of
Stanford’s Irish Rhapsodies and large-scale
choral pieces can, but you realise after
a time that only a true composer could
have written music which so unfailingly
does the right thing. It’s music you
can trust.
The organ loft does
not appear to have formed part of Bridge’s
curriculum (he was a very fine viola
player) but he was too consummate a
craftsman to write ineffectively for
any medium. Most of his organ works,
including the present group, are early
pieces (though he returned to the instrument
at the end of his life), belonging to
the period in which elegance, charm
and fine workmanship predominated –
long before the radical turn which began
with the Piano Sonata of 1921-4. Even
so, they brought a breath of fresh air
to many a parish church and, such is
the innate conservatism of the organ
world, may yet do so today.
This recording was
the last to be made in Hereford Cathedral
before the recent (2004) restoration
of the organ. Oddly enough, the first
recording to be made following the previous
(1978) restoration also contained the
Parry "Little Organ Book"
piece, as part of an all-Parry recital
by Peter Dyke’s predecessor Roy Massey
(a Vista LP, VPS 1086). At the outset
the two performances sound remarkably
similar; the tempo is the same, Parry’s
clearly-marked phrasing is scrupulously
observed by both organists and the registration
seems identical. But as the music proceeds
there are two differences; one is that
Massey allows the music to move forward
more urgently in the central part of
the piece, the other is that he changes
stops more often. Already at the fifth
bar he introduces a new colour while
Dyke proceeds without a change. While
it is true that such a simple piece
can be effective on a small organ with
a limited number of stops, when you
have all the resources of the Hereford
Cathedral instrument to hand, it seems
a pity not to use them.
One the whole, I have
to take this as symptomatic of a certain
lack of boldness on the part of Peter
Dyke, something of which Massey certainly
cannot be accused – the instrument leaps
to life in his hands. We are allowed
a brief but glorious outburst of tuba
stop in the Brewer but in general Dyke
seems afraid to let the organ roar its
guts out, to the detriment of some of
the Stanford and Bridge pieces. It’s
all very tasteful but a bit polite.
Nor does the recording
help. The organ, ecclesiastical reverberation
and the human ear are strange bedfellows.
If you sit half-way down a reverberant
but acoustically well-calculated Cathedral
or Church, the organ sound is before
you while the reverberation surrounds
you, and yet the human ear manages to
sort it out, allowing you to hear the
organ with complete clarity even while
the echoes of it are swirling all around
you. If you put a pair of microphones
in place of the human ears, they will
hear the same things as your ears, and
if you listen to the result on headphones
you will get the same effect: the organ
before you, completely clear, with the
echo all around. But if you listen to
this same recording on the loudspeakers
of your sitting-room, you will hear
the original organ sound and its echoes
all in front of you, your ears
will be powerless to separate the two
things and you will hear smudged harmonies
and a confused melodic line.
There would seem to
be two ways round this. In the first
place, the composer should write in
such a way that the music remains clear
even in an acoustic which has a long
reverberation period (i.e., calculating
the echo as a built-in part of the musical
effect). It would appear from this disc
that Bridge was not able to do this,
while Stanford and some of the "Little
Organ Book" composers were. The
Stanford pieces are totally clear, the
Bridge ones are often confused. (Indeed,
the Bridge pieces come off best in a
smallish Church without too much reverberation,
while Stanford can seem rather arid
in such circumstances):
In the second place,
the engineers should place their microphones
with a view to what the effect will
be when replayed through loudspeakers,
rather than simply reproducing what
they hear. Basically, I suppose this
means recording closer up. The Massey
Vista disc sounds clear to a fault on
headphones, but truly magnificent over
loudspeakers. The more distanced Lammas
recording sounds rather mushy. I don’t
want to say it is bad, but anyone seeking
evidence that recording techniques have
declined over the last 25 years will
find grist to his mill in Hereford.
In conclusion, then,
this is a nice disc which might have
been something more than that. There
are useful notes and full specifications
of the organ.
Christopher Howell
Peter Dyke (organ)