Editorial
Maggie Hamilton - Editor
From the current issue of Choir & Organ
Better late than never
Hurrah! Southbank Centre has at last announced that it will be launching an appeal in September to raise funds for the completion of the restoration and reinstallation of the organ in the Royal Festival Hall (page 4). A Heritage Lottery Funding application for nearly £1m has successfully passed the first round and faces the competitive second round in March. Nonetheless, it is anticipated that the project will not be completed until 2013 at the earliest, a full six years after the reopening of the Hall; so alongside the cheers from the many people who have been rooting for the organ’s reinstallation since it was first dismantled and put in store in 2005 will be the inevitable question: ‘Why has it taken them so long?’ It is, after all, three years since the RFH reopened with only a third of the instrument in the chamber. At a press conference in 2007 the SBC management team announced that the Hall’s restoration was complete; since then, far from launching an appeal for the organ, they have sat on their hands while their occasional bland professions of commitment to the organ project have been as convincing as Jack Straw at the Chilcot Inquiry.
But it is not the aim of this magazine to pour cold water on this project. Many questions of attitude and finance are unanswered, and are likely to remain so; but, without taking our eye off the ball, the most important thing now is to encourage the complete reinstallation of the organ with all speed. There have been changes of personnel at SBC, and chief executive Alan Bishop, who assumed the post a year ago, has pledged to Choir & Organ his personal commitment to the project, which is welcome. C&O will certainly be among those cheering from the sidelines and doing what we can to support every initiative to see the project through to a happy conclusion. And on SBC’s Individual Support web page we hope soon to see the addition of ‘Sponsor the organ’ to the list of ‘the many ways you can get involved and how your support will help Southbank Centre’.
As we approach Passiontide, David Hill opens a series on choral classics with Bach’s St John Passion (page 52). Many theologians argue that the Passion of Christ continues today in unjust arrests, detentions, torture and putting to death of people around the world. James MacMillan, whose own setting of the St John text is to be performed again at the Barbican Centre two years after its premiere, shares his personal understanding of this story, as relevant today as 2,000 years ago (page 18). And a new choral work by Ed Hughes (page 47), setting texts by prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, transports us outside traditional church parameters to the timelessness and universality of Christ.
In The Next Issue of Choir & Organ: May/June 2010 on sale 25 March
- Does Orgues Létourneau’s new instrument in Oakland, California, fit the lively acoustic of the new cathedral, and how will director of music Rudy de Vos use it in a community of broad ethnic diversity?
- John Joubert’s An English Requiem will be premiered at Gloucester’s Three Choirs Festival, where he will be composer in residence in August.
- Ian Bell begins a new series by asking: has the 1970s threat of a worldwide style of neo-classical organ building been replaced by a resurgence of characterful national quirks poached by, and from, our neighbours in a kind of organ building pick-and-mix?
- With some pages in more than 30 parts, the creation of a new vocal score of Havergal Brian’s huge Gothic Symphony for United Music Publisher was as fascinating as it was frustrating.
- Graeme Kay talks to classical and cinema organ performer Richard Hills, who is putting the restored, dual-console Compton organ in Southampton Guildhall back on the map.
- Folk song has influenced composers for hundreds of years, but has usually been regarded as inferior to classical music. Now, outreach projects initiated by the English Folk Dance and Song Society are helping people to rediscover and appreciate their heritage.
- Maurice Grant’s modernist design for the organ in New College Chapel, Oxford, caused much argument; John Norman compares the case with the rival design that was rejected.
- Plus…
Our regular columns, news, recitals, reviews, tutorials, and a new choral work to download free of charge.
