You can now listen back to yesterday's first Lent Course by visiting our website at https://bradfordcathedral.org/worship/lent/.Please join us next Wednesday (18th) from 7pm (refreshments at 6:30pm for the second session, entitled 'This is His Story: This is Our Story'.
Ed Jones, formerly of Bradford Cathedral and now at Worcester, is the tenth organist to play in this season of Wednesday@One organ recitals. We spoke to him about his upcoming organ recital to find out what we can expect from his programme as well as finding out more about his career.So what have you been up to since you left Bradford Cathedral?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">I’ve started a new post at Worcester. I’m the sub-assistant organist and my main duties are that I direct the voluntary choir of boys and adults, and the principal accompanist of the Cathedral Choir when the girls are singing. But because it’s just a part-time job I can also fill my time up with other bits and pieces, which keeps it fun!</span>How are things at Worcester Cathedral?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">They’re going very well – all the music is really fun to be involved with. I knew the Director of Music from a previous post so I get on really well with him and it’s a joy to work with everyone else.</span>Your biography says that you’re acting as the Chief Worcester Sauce taster. Have you received many accolades for that?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">Well that’s necessarily true…! I usually put some amusing things in my biogs. I have no formal post with them unfortunately!</span>Could you give us a brief introduction to yourself?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">I came into cathedral music because I heard a counter-tenor sing. If you see a cat on the street and it barks, it’s not what you expect. It was the same for me hearing a counter-tenor for the first time! I then started singing alongside him at the cathedral. It was then a Priest who phoned me up and asked if I wanted to play the organ at a local parish church, during my time at University.</span>For you, what makes a great lunchtime organ recital?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">It’s tricky. I try and have something interesting for a lot of people, so I’ll have something spiky, something that has a nice flowing melody, and something that people will latch onto or might well know. Also something interested that the organ enthusiasts will have to talk about, but something that people who don’t know anything about organ music will still enjoy for forty-five minutes.</span>How did you pick the pieces for your recital?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">I picked Jackson’s Diversion for Mixtures because the mixtures sound absolutely fabulous on the organ here, so I thought I’d learn it for that very purpose. The choir were singing some Jackson that day so it fitted well.</span>MacMillan’s St Andrew’s Suite is a piece I bought years and years ago for the middle movement as it’s very slow and very beautiful, and I later thought I should learn the rest of it to keep hold of my Scottish heritage. I was actually in St. Andrews when it was premiered.Hindemith’s Sonata no. 2 is a strange one. Hindemith wrote a sonata for every single instrument as he thought it would be a good compositional tool. He’s a very intelligent man, writing for all these instruments, so it’s quite a challenge playing it. He enjoyed the organ so much he wrote a further two sonatas for the instrument! I played the first one quite a bit so now I’m learning the second one.Alain’s Litanies is a piece that I heard and thought, ‘I must learn that’, then I didn’t learn it as it’s quite tricky – then a year later I’d hear it again and so on – and this happened to me about five times and I realized I had to learn it, so I bought the music and put it down on the music list and, of course, once it’s printed you have to play it!It’s a phenomenal piece, but he was a French organist who died in the war at only 29-years-old. His music is so wonderful and I often wonder, had he lived on, what he would have gone onto write.What are your plans for the rest of 2020?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">There are lots of projects going on in Worcester. The current challenge I have this week is to complete a 4×4 Rubik’s cube! I’ll just see what the rest of the year brings.</span>Finally, going back to your entirely serious biography: your hobbies are distance running, Guyanese wood-carving, and curry and beer – but which is the best?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">The one I look forward to most on my Bradford trips is the curry! Worcester has a really good selection of Thai curries but not much in the way of Indian curries. Wherever you go there is good beer; wherever you go you can go for long runs, and wherever you go you can carve, but the curry is something I definitely miss from Bradford!</span>Join us for our weekly Wednesday@One Organ Recitals at 1pm, with a lunch buffet available from 12:30pm. Ed Jones will be playing on Wednesday 18th March 2020. More information on this recital, all others and this season’s coffee concerts can be found in the programme available to buy from the recitals and concerts.
"These readings belong to one of the most ancient traditions of the Christian church during #Lent: the scrutiny Sundays as they are known."Listen back to Sunday's sermon now at https://bradfordcathedral.org/worship/listen-back/
Andrew Prior of Islington is the ninth organist to play in this season of Wednesday@One organ recitals. We spoke to him about his upcoming organ recital to find out what we can expect from his programme as well as finding out more about his career.Could you give us an introduction to how you got into music?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">I was a chorister in the local village choir when I was a boy and started learning the piano at around the age of five at school. Whilst singing in the choir I was rather captivated by the organ. My piano teacher was an organist in a neighbouring village. I wasn’t very good at practicing diligently, so he said that if I could get a piece I was learning ready by the following week, he’d let me play it on the church organ. That was when I was aged about eight and it just stuck, as I really enjoyed the experience. I soon was able to play hymns at church services and then voluntaries, and it went from there.</span>My parents, very kindly, bought me an organ for the house. We had a small sun lounge at the back and they bought a three manual and pedal reed organ, which is quite unusual, but it fitted into the space and it became my practice instrument.At fourteen, I became the organist at my local church, which was great fun, and at the same age I was asked to play for my sister’s wedding at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, which is one of the big churches in London. I was terrified at the prospect, but I played for her wedding and conducting that service was the Director of Music at HM Chapels Royal at Hampton Court. Afterwards he wrote to my father and said that he had been very taken by my playing and invited me to be the first organ scholar at HM Chapels Royal! I started that at the age of fifteen-and-a-half.You were a solicitor by profession; did you find music was a good balance with that?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">It was an excellent balance. We sold the reed organ we had to a solicitor /organist with whom we became good friends. My parents had come across a wonderful organ builder called George Sixsmith, whose organ company in Ashton-under-Lyne is still going. They built a very small two-rank extension pipe organ for our sun lounge. There were two ranks of pipes contained in a swell box with a glass front, and attached was a two manual and pedal organ. Our solicitor friend told me that if I ever wanted to go into the profession to let him know. My organ scholarship at Hampton Court helped my CV greatly in applying for an organ scholarship to Cambridge, which I was awarded in 1976. But an alternative career in the law remained an option.</span>When I went up to Cambridge I soon realised that I was up against people like John Scott, Thomas Trotter and David Hill, all wonderfully talented people, and I thought to myself that I couldn’t compete with them as they were so much better than me, so I took that solicitor up on his offer.As an aside, in 1977, in my first term I went to stay with my senior organ scholar in Bingley and he took me to Bradford Cathedral as John Scott was playing the opening recital on the newly restored organ by Walker. So it’s wonderful to be coming back.I took up the legal profession with the aim of playing the organ, keeping music as an informal hobby. I kept it going, but drifted a bit for ten years until I found myself deputising for a church in Surrey which had the most amazing organ made by Frobenius, a Danish organ builder, and I had a new lease of life there, being the organist for eleven years.I had the most wonderful time doing that until I was around the age of forty, by which time my job moved me from being local to London, so I didn’t have time to practice and so I let it slip again.I carried on playing for for friends and families at funerals and weddings but when I reached sixty, almost two years ago, there was a restructuring at work and I was made an offer for early retirement, and the figures worked out. My wife, at the time, was working at All Saints, Margaret Street, where Dame Gillian Weir, the wonderful organist who taught me at Cambridge, was in the office. She asked what I planned to do with my retirement and she told me to get back onto the organ bench and get playing!At this same time a professional organist friend had just bought a Hauptwerk organ, and given his enthusiasm for the way technology had moved on, I was inspired to purchase a system for our home which was installed in the attic of our house in North London. Alex Berry, your Director of Music then paid us a visit through a mutual friend, and we played on the instrument and chatted about my return to playing, which led to him to set me a target to give a recital in Bradford in a year’s time, and so here we are!With your music, travelling and photography you’re enjoying your retirement?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">I’m loving it! It’s so fulfilling as my day will start with some organ practice and then I take photographs for people who need profile shots for their website, and I have just worked on photographs for the front cover of Organists Review. Those two hobbies are keeping me more than busy, not to mention travelling as well. Life couldn’t be better!</span>For you, what makes a good lunchtime organ recital?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">I think the objective is to ensure that everyone who goes home after recital has liked something. They might have been informed by a piece or a composer they don’t know; they may have been wowed by something that was exciting; or they may just carry a tune away with them. One of the pieces I’m playing is Elegy by George Thalben-Ball, who was remarkably famous in his day, and was organist at Temple Church in London. I went to the City of London School and all the choristers would come from the school and I got to know Thalben-Ball very well indeed. He was a wonderful and inspirational man. He advised that when you give a recital, you should make sure that you have given pleasure to those who’ve come along to hear you. You may have a musician there, an academic, or a shopkeeper, or someone who has just popped in for forty minutes in their lunch break. You can’t be too esoteric or too academic; you have to give a good variety.</span>How did you pick your pieces for your recital?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">J.S. Bach is always going to be key in my view. Of all the composers who wrote for the organ, Bach is really supreme, and so it’s always a good thing to include some of his music. And his great mentor was Buxtehude, so that gave me the shape for the start of the recital. In between these composers, I have some chorale preludes from composers from Norway, England and France, all written for the Orgelbuchlein Project of which I’m a trustee and patron. That project came about because Bach’s Orgelbüchlein, or ‘Little Organ Book’ was intended to contain around 164 choral preludes based on the hymn tunes of the day, but Bach only completed 46, leaving blank pages, some with just the title, or the title and the tune.</span>My very good friend William Whitehead started the project to complete the book but with composers from the modern day, composing short chorale preludes to fill the gaps. This project was completed last year and to celebrate the achievement I decded that whenever I give an organ recital I should play some of the pieces, to get them out there to make people aware of this great work that my friend did over these years in encouraging composers to come forward and compose!So, from Germany to England, and alongside my tribute to George Thalben Ball with his Elegy, another wonderful piece, the Canzona by Percy Whitlock.Then we finish with France. Thalben-Ball often played Fiat Lux by Theodore Dubois, and so I thought I’d end with that, and precede it with a beautiful and quiet piece from the same volume of twelve pieces, In Paradisum.I therefore hope that there’s something for everyone in my organ recital!I imagine that variety keeps things interesting for you as the player?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">It does, because each piece has its own challenges. The three pieces from the Orgelbuchlein Project are so different: one is very slow, one is very delicate, and one is quite bonkers! They’re three representative pieces from the project and they give me a challenge in registering them to bring out their character, which of course applies to all the pieces I’ll be playing. I’m looking forward very much to acquainting myself with the instrument so as to produce the colours to show them all off well.</span>Finally, do you have any big plans for the rest of 2020?<span style="font-size: 1rem;">More recitals! I’m grateful to Alex Berry for inviting me to give this recital, as I’d not really intended to give organ recitals on an on-going basis. I’ve really loved this challenge as its renewed my enthusiasm for communicating music to wider audiences, so on the strength on this I have another recital to give in South London in October and before then a recital in a Stately Home in Wiltshire.</span>Join us for our weekly Wednesday@One Organ Recitals at 1pm, with a lunch buffet available from 12:30pm. Andrew Prior will be playing on Wednesday 11th March 2020. More information on this recital, all others and this season’s coffee concerts can be found in the programme available to buy from the recitals and concerts.
