BACH AT BRIDGEWATER - JONATHAN SCOTT - ORGAN CONCERT - SATURDAY 15TH MAY 2021 (UK TIME)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] hello and welcome to today's concert and today we're at the bridgewater hall in manchester one of the world's great concert halls i'm associate artist here and i give a series of argument recitals every year however not for the past 12 14 months i should be in the middle of the right now so we thought we'd bring you this wonderful instrument and concert hall because it's an amazing sound and since we're back at bridgewater what better than bark at bridgewater some of johann sebastian bach's greatest music tom my brother is here filming and recording and we've had the wonderful help of david wood the organ builder who's been in tuned as fast as humanly possible today and done an absolutely fantastic job and he does a great job of looking after this organ and we're going to give you some of bach's great works as i said and not just organ works some orchestral transcriptions like we just heard the first movement of brandenburg concerto number three i'm going to lead straight on with a piece the bach f major to carter now back was known as the greatest organist to have ever lived and he would have known an instrument really just like this and upstairs here i can play from a console downstairs as well which is electric and operates the whole arc in exactly the same way this is a mechanical console every note is physically attached to a pallet inside which lets the air into the pipe and every single pipe you can see actually plays so i can affect the sound really well you see because even though i can attack the note in a different way this is why you can't recreate it electronically i'll record it and recreate it afterwards because when you're playing the notes are all reacting with each other and interacting with the air space in the hall and every single note as i said plays so things like the big notes on the front they all play as well and back was fame for his great virtuoso technique he was said to be able to play things with his feet that people would only try with their hands normally and this piece i want to play now is a great example of that the f major takata imitative cannons throughout the whole piece the pedal solos at the beginning and a huge buildup it's almost comical the way you think it's never actually going to finish a brilliant brilliant exciting piece i hope you enjoy this this is box to carter in f [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] quite a workout on an instrument like this absolutely relentless and in back you haven't got a moment to think you can't let your eye off the ball for a second because it's just ever-changing something's happening in all the parts sometimes you might have three four five six things all going on at once in inner parts however we're going to go something slightly simpler as i've said back wrote many different styles of music and these cello suites are a great example of that people often thought of them as studies because they thought they were so difficult and they're also so simple in many ways the one i'm going to play you is the first one in c major the prelude for his most famous movement however because people think this is an etude in many ways for cello it's a very simple cards progression and that that's just decorated around sort of a card sequence and what bach does he goes around this and creates melody and farm and various arpeggios which just create a beautiful beautiful harmony and melody he was a master of counterpoint but what we're going to do now is play it with our feet while my feet i'm sure bat would have approved of this he wouldn't have had as many notes of this on his pedal board but since he was such a great virtuoso i could play it with one hand probably but there's absolutely no fun in that whatsoever and you don't get the sense of difficulty in the leaps now when you're playing the organ there are basic rules when you start learning um try not to look at your feet don't hold on to the bench too much and don't cross your legs i'm about to break all those rules i hope you don't mind for a piece like this but it's such such wonderful music i hope you enjoy this this is the prelude from box cello suite number one [Music] um [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] hmm [Music] uh well that's giving my hands a rest if not my feet um great to be able to use the pedal board in that way and show that that's what the pedals are for to create another line of music they also create bass lines as well and that's what we do in the next piece box air on the g string as it's known originally the air from the orchestral suites in d major the strings only and continuo it's one of his few strings only pieces from that orchestral suite in fact the whole suite would start to remember the strings only at first and the wind and percussion added later um very pure and it sound a very very famous melody and card progression known as there on a g-string because a german violinist um august wilhelm translated it down in pitch and played it on the g string of his violin the lowest string a very sort of rich and warm sound with the whole orchestra and it became known in this version up until the 1930s or so when it was still being recorded as the air and of course played on the g string on the g string this is a version i've created from the orchestral score which is very warm very rich not authentic in back style in any way but uses the resources of this argument to create a very warm orchestral texture i recorded this originally at whitworth hall in manchester just down the road to show off the organ there little did i realize that only a couple of years later it would have over four million views and be one of the most popular things that ever recorded so there's no pressure to do a good version now this is bach's air on the g string [Music] [Music] um [Music] too [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] an incredibly famous piece of music but love is playing here i hope you enjoyed that version of it back-to-backs organ music now um as i've said bat was a great virtuoso but from the age of about 17 or so he was uh he treated an equal with his much older peers and used to go and demonstrate new organs when an organ builder builds an organ like this it all looks very nice however they could have put in rotten wood missed out pipes used cheap materials and not done a very good job at all so people like bark were called in as an organ expert to tell the local parish or the priest or whoever's in charge the town council that the person who had built the organ had done a good job and they used to be really scared when bach turned up because he was so thorough he knew what wood should have been used how much tin should have been in the pipes things like that and he also used to register in a strange way people used to say they were scared when he drew strange combinations of stops he'd try every sound out and it's thought that this next piece i'm going to play the bach takata adagio and fugue in c major is possibly written for the purpose of demonstrating an organ we begin at the opening using some of the very high and solo sounds on the organ then a pedal solo and then full argon the second the adagio is a beautiful melody using a solo sound this time on the positive and an accompaniment with the pedal in the softer stops and then a big fugue using the whole organ it would test whether the wind was wobbling and could take all the sound that bark would use but also demonstrate the tuning the various sounds that were given and also that the the beauty of the sound and the voicing as well whether it's for that purpose or not it's a brilliant brilliant piece of music and one of my favorites of bach's argument works i hope you enjoy this this is bach's takata adagio and fugue in c major [Music] um [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] bye um [Music] you [Music] [Music] me [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Music] a slight surprise of an ending and you think after such a big piece it's going to end with a big big cadence and it just sort of disappears and down to the bottom of the keyboard a brilliant brilliant piece very energetic and a great way of using this instrument we've reached the end of the concert today so i hope you've enjoyed coming back to bridgewater hall hopefully there'll be live concerts again soon and i look forward to seeing you at one of the organ concerts but it's been wonderful to give this argument a workout it's only been played about twice in the last 14 months and a wonderful wonderful sound thank you again to tom my brother for filming and recording hopefully he managed to get around the whole hall it's a big space to david ward for tuning and looking after this argument so well and everyone at bridgewater hall for letting us in today and looking after us they do a great job and they're absolutely wonderful and so so welcoming and thank you to you for watching today we'll bring you more concerts soon and hopefully seeing it one in real life before too long anyway in the meantime i hope you enjoyed this final piece i'm going to play another orchestral piece by john sebastian bach one of his most famous originally for flute solo it's the badonari from the orchestral suite in b minor quite a workout on the organ so something fairly light to finish with and uh i'll look forward to seeing you again soon this is bach's baton area in b minor [Music] you

Channel: scottbrothersduo

Views: 130,071

Keywords: Bach, Bridgewater, Johann, Sebastian, Organ, Pipe Organ, Concert Hall, Recital, Concert, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, UK, Jonathan Scott, Toccata in F, Brandenburg, Toccata Adagio Fugue, Prelude, Cello Suite no. 1, Badinerie, Marcussen & Søn, Orgel, Orgue, Online Concert

Id: trnS7grN5D4

Length: 49min 52sec (2992 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021