Music Chamber

David Gammie (organ)

 

John E. West (1865-1929) Allegro maestoso, from Sonata in D minor (1895)

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) Concerto in F, Op.4 no. 5 Larghetto – Allegro - Alla siciliana - Presto

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) Ave Maria

Adagio from the Fourth Violin Sonata ofJS Bach Prelude & Fugue on ‘BACH’

Easthope Martin (1882-1925) Evensong (1910)

C. Edgar Ford (1881- 19??) Moto perpetuo & Intermezzo (1916)

Edward d’Evry (1869-1950) Toccata (1898)

 

David Gammie began organ lessons at Winchester, and gave his first public recital in London when he was just 16, but it was only after leaving Oxford with a Classics degree that he took up music more seriously, studying with H.A. Bate in London, and then with Peter Hurford in Cambridge. David has played regular recitals at all the London cathedrals, given solo recitals on Radio 3, and made festival appearances at St Albans, Brighton and Guildford. In recent years he has played in France and Australia, while choral accompaniment has taken him to Belgium, Germany and the USA. He also enjoys writing about music; he provides programme notes for concerts all over the country, and he has written booklet notes for around sixty CDs of organ and choral music. David lives in Wimbledon, where he is Organist at the Church of the Sacred Heart, one of the largest Catholic churches in southern England. Built by Walkers in 1912, the Sacred Heart organ is a big brother and an almost exact contemporary of the Walker organ here at St. Peter’s. Like the St. Peter’s organ, it has retained all its original pipes and mechanism, and it is currently undergoing a comprehensive restoration by Mander Organs, with the aid of a generous grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

 

Liszt’s extraordinarily diverse life and career fell roughly into three periods: his virtuoso years as an international celebrity of the concert platform, his early retirement to Weimar, where he embarked on a fearless exploration of new musical horizons (“Music from a new world”, as his friend Saint-Saëns once said), and the spiritual pilgrimage of his later years, when he moved to Rome and took minor orders in the Catholic Church. His extensive output of sacred music remains little-known. The beautiful setting of the Ave Maria originated as a choral work in 1846, but he also arranged it for organ, and for piano, as the second of his Harmonies Poétiques et Réligieuses. Liszt was always generous in his promotion of the music of other composers, both dead and alive. Like his contemporaries Mendelssohn and Schumann, he was devoted to Bach: “…When I have had my fill of Handel’s triads, I am drawn to the priceless dissonances of the Passions and the B minor Mass.” He transcribed many Bach organ works for the piano, and a few vocal and chamber works for the organ. The three melodic lines of the well-known Adagio from Bach’s C minor Violin Sonata (violin plus keyboard treble and bass) are well suited to two manuals and pedals on the organ, and required no alteration. But Bach’s concluding cadenza leads straight into the Sonata’s finale, so Liszt substituted a magical little ending of his own. Both Schumann (in 1845) and Liszt (in 1855) were inspired to compose a tribute to Bach in the form of a work based on the musical motif derived in German from the letters of his name (in English, B flat–A–C–B natural).  Schumann acknowledged Bach’s contrapuntal genius by composing a set of Fugues, but Liszt – at the height of his Weimar period – was more interested in priceless dissonance, and wrote a towering masterpiece in his most advanced and imaginative style – truly, Music from a New World. His “Prelude & Fugue” is an improvisatory fantasia that draws every drop of drama and emotion out of the 4-note chromatic motif, which permeates almost every bar. The “Fugue” forms a hushed and dark-hued episode of romantic soul-searching in the middle of the piece, and would not be recognised a real fugue by either Bach or Schumann; a great Liszt scholar, the late Humphrey Searle, once described this part of the work as “a more-or-less direct link between Bach and Schoenberg.”

 

The Liszt pieces are framed by some period English music dating from around the time this organ was built (Handel is of course the wrong period, but he can be regarded as an honorary Englishman, and his short  Concerto provides an opportunity to enjoy some lighter textures and tone-colours). The composers were all well-known organists in the Edwardian era. John West’s Sonata is a vigorous and tuneful work that can bear comparison with any of the better-known music that was being written in the 1890s in France and Germany. Edward D’Evry was organist at the Brompton Oratory for many years, but the central section of his rousing Toccata strays unashamedly into the realm of “light music”, which is where the other two pieces in the final group definitely belong. Evensong is a real Edwardian classic, much-loved and frequently performed in its day. Ford’s featherlight scherzo is just one short piece, despite the rather confusing title; the Intermezzo is the melodic middle section, whose tune is craftily combined with the moto perpetuo on the last page.