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Royal Albert Hall
The Sunday Times, 25th June 2006 *** About £1.7m has been spent on refurbishing this illustrious instrument, and it sounds wonderful in Preston's performances of a repertoire designed to show off its versatility. He begins with a spectacular arrangement of the overture to Mendelssohn's St Paul by WT Best, who inaugurated the organ in1871, and proceeds to Schumann's Six Fugues on B-A-C-H, a powerful, substantial half hour. Modern music is represented by William Bolcom's Fantasia on two spirituals, and the range extends to the theatre-organ style of The Brothers Gershwin, Howard Cable's arrangement of familiar tunes. Karg-Elert's Valse Mignonne is in a similar vein, though Joseph Jongen's Sonatas Eroïca is most definitely serious. Paul Driver The Sunday Telegraph, 25th June 2006 The mighty beast that is the Royal Albert Hall's organ was silenced a few years ago. It had begun to wheeze and show its age in other ways, so was subjected to a thorough overhaul, but it was spectacuarly back in action for the 2004 BBC Proms. Now Simon Preston has devised this magnificent programme of music, magnificently played and impressivley recorded, that suits the instrument's ample dimensions ideally. Not that it is incapable of softer hues, as Preston shows in some of the more subdued sections of Schumann's Six Fugues on BACH and in the delicacies of the Valse mignonne by Sigfrid Karg-Elert. But it is essentially a Victorian organ, designed to fill a vast auditorium; its lung capacity is formidable, and its full roar is fearsome. Joseph Jongen's Sonata eroïca is thus given a performance that lives up to its title with epic aplomb. But equally the organ's range of colour is explored in a fantasia by William Bolcom, and it gamely lets its hair down for Howard Cable's The Brothers Gershwin. Preston tames the beast, but allows it to roam on a long leash. Geoffrey Norris BBC Music Magazine, August 2006 The Royal Albert Hall has the biggest and most impressive of Britain's 'town hall' organs, and has recently been refurbished. In a tour de force of programming, one hears most of its myriad colour combinations on this disc. Though Preston sometimes gets into a motoric mode that you could set your watch by, it is this technical rat-tat-tat that draws many to his playing (viz the second of Schumann's fugues). Rhythmic drive has always been fundamental to his brand, but the sheer force of gesture and manipulation of tone colour are the winning qualities for me. The pacing of the Schumann fugues, building up to the final ones impressive climax, is masterly (it would be churlish to quibble about the rather podgy registration of the fifth), And the Bolcom Free Fantasia (a piece hitherto unknown to me that makes a 'darkness to light' journey through ever diminishing levels of dissonance) is treated as an exercise in clarity of colour and line. If the Jongen Sonata Eroica is a piece that should have been drowned at birth, it is nevertheless well performed. The organ sounds wonderful, with all the shimmer and shudder that a High Victorian organ should have. Difficult to capture, but Signum has done a pretty good job. William Whitehead International Record Review, September 2006 In September 1966 London's Royal Albert Hall staged an organ extravaganza in which two up-and-coming young stars of the British organ scene stole the show: Gillian Weir and Simon Preston. Forty years on, and looking back on careers which have seen both rise to the top of the international concert organist tree, they have separately returned to the Albert Hall to put the newly restored organ through its paces. Weir got in first (reviewed in June 2005), and now Preston has followed with his own immensely entertaining disc. Neither player revisited the repertoire of their 1966 triumphs (immortalized on an Abbey LP recorded live at the event - APR606), but in Weir's case that's understandable; fun at the time, John McCabe's Miniconcerto for 485 penny-whistles, organ and percussion (with 12-year-old Marc Rochester making his recording debut as a penny-whistler) was never destined for posterity. Preston, however, could well have attempted a repeat of his stunning Bossi Étude Symphonique; but, there again, he probably could never re-create the sheer electrifying virtuosity which, in 1966, roused the entire RAH audience to its collective feet. His programme is electrifying none the less and even introduces music which would surely have been frowned on by the fuddy-duddies who then held sway with the British organ community. Would he, for example, had dared then to confess his penchant for theatre organs with such outrageous offerings as Howard Cable's unsubtle medley of Gershwin melodies or William Bolcom's Free Fantasia (admittedly written 18 years after the original RAH event)? He might have avoided the ire of the censors with Karg-Elert's syrupy Valse Mignonne, but not played like this, with every nuance of the theatre organist's art laid on thick. There's seriousness, too, in Schumann and Mendelssohn, W. T. Best's long-forgotten transcription of the latter's St Paul Overture given such a compelling performance here that I suspect it will soon start reappearing in organ recitals. Most of all there is Preston's trademark virtuosity, dazzlingly displayed in a riveting account on Jongen's Sonata ëroica. True, he does get a little carried away, and some of the detail in the fugue doesn't bear close scrutiny, but as a communicative, musical and absorbing performance, this is unbeatable. Perhaps the recording is a little less vivid that priory's for Weir, and certainly the booklet should have justified the disc's title by providing more that a mere stop-list. Careful editing might also have prevented the 20-year discrepancy between the date of the organ's original opening as given (correctly) on page 3 and (incorrectly) on page 4. But for Preston's playing alone this disc is an absolute must have. Marc Rochester Cambridge (Magazine of the Cambridge Society), Performing on the newly restored Royal Albert Hall organ, Simon Preston also shows Mendelssohn responding to Bach when he plays the overture to St Paul in an arrangement by the illustrious W T Best, who inaugurated the mighty instrument a century and a quarter ago. The Baroque master was likewise the moving spirit behind the Six Fugues that Schumann was able, thanks to the German names for the notes of the scale, to found on the letters BACH. The mood is lighter in Gershwin tunes and Karg-Elert's 'Valse Mignonne', but Jongen's sonata Eroïca marks a reversion to the grand manner. Taking the variety of moods in his stride, Preston glories in the organ's inexhaustible versatility. Because the loud is so loud and, as Christopher Robin might say, the quiet is so quiet, this disc may pose a problem for the listener at home. Twiddling the volume knob is one answer; another one is a pilgrimage to the Royal Albert Hall. Christopher Smith |
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