Incorporated Association of Organists (IAO) Bath Music Festival

With a break from a very long tradition, this year’s annual gathering of members of the Incorporated Association of Organists became a Music Festival rather than a Congress. Our current President Peter King, until 31 July the Director of Music at Bath Abbey, concluded that what we did was not really a Congress, more of a meeting to hear music and the occasional lecture. He also felt that as organists, we possibly listened to too much organ music and not enough of anything else.

So we were invited to Bath for a Music Festival and very good it was too. As artistic director, Peter combined some outstanding organ recitals with music for piano, harpsichord, voice, string quartet, chamber choir and orchestra. The Festival opened on the Sunday of arrival with a superb recital by Peter on the magnificent Bath Abbey Klais. It fills the cathedral with a warm, rich sound and this German instrument, incorporating some earlier HNB pipework, has a definite English edge.

The week continued with a Monday visit to Downside Abbey where Jonathan Vaughn from Wells Cathedral demonstrated the partly restored the 37 rank, 142 stop Compton, all of which one can imagine would be required to accompany the boys in term time; and then an afternoon at leisure in Wells.

Here Jonathan was spotted in the cathedral and persuaded to play his own transcription of a movement from Tchaikovsky’s 4th symphony so at least we got to hear the 67 stop Willis/H&H. The day was completed with a glorious concert in the Abbey by the Cantemus Chamber Choir from Cardiff , conducted by Huw Williams, who will become Bath’s new director of music in January 2017.

The variety of the week was exemplified by a thrilling piano recital played entirely from memory by Jeremy Filsell, equally at home as a virtuoso pianist or organist, which skill he demonstrated later in Liszt’s monumental Ad Nos, also from memory and immediately after taking a Bach and Buxtehude masterclass on the von Beckerath organ of Marlborough College. Jeremy also featured as the organist in the orchestral concert conducted by David Hill in the Abbey at the end of the week.

To further wet our non-organ appetites, Sophie Yates played a brilliant harpsichord recital and this was followed by an intensely musical and moving song recital by Amy Lyddon, beautifully accompanied by Ian Tindale. Back in the organ world we were treated to a magisterially profound recital from David Hill “in memoriam John Scott” at the Abbey and from John Challenger in the quintessentially English surroundings of Salisbury Cathedral on a quintessentially English organ by Father Willis.

With visits to the Roman Baths and Spa, dinner in the elegant Georgian Pump Room where we were welcomed by the Mayor and heard Paul Brough as our guest speaker, a lecture on the history of the Great Western Railway by local expert Colin Maggs and a Festival Choir rehearsed and conducted by Huw Williams for the final Festival Eucharist it was a memorable week in so many ways. As Peter remains our President and is already planning next year’s Festival in Oxford, I cannot recommend too highly putting the date in our diaries now and enjoying all Oxford has to offer on 23-28 July 2017.

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David Wakefield

I was the President of the Organ Club of Great Britain from 2009 to 2012 and I am a Vice president of the Eric Thompson Trust, which provides bursaries for specific educational projects for young professional organists; and I chair the Larkin Trust with similar aims but associated with St. Giles Cripplegate and the Royal College of Organists, of which I became a Trustee and Council Member in 2013. I was elected to the committee of SSLSO at the 2016 AGM. My interest in all things “organ” has gone from being an occasional hobby to something of an unpaid profession, through which I have developed a range of contacts and informants. I will try and find relevant items from the world of organs, organists and organ music to entertain and inform you each month.

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