THE ORGAN OF CHESTER CATHEDRAL - JONATHAN SCOTT - SATURDAY 29TH MAY 2021 7PM (UK time)

[Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey [Music] hello and welcome to today's concert and today we're in an absolutely spectacular setting of chester cathedral this uh amazing city was a very important roman stronghold and it's thought there's been a religious site here since roman times this amazing building was built around 1093 again in the 16th century and restored in the 19th century and we've got architecture from just about every period from the norman period onwards and tom my brother is here filming and recording today i'm going to bring you a concert and show you all the wonderful architecture and some of the incredible features of this absolutely spectacular building particularly important are the missouri cars there's 48 of them in total dating from the 1380s some of the best examples in the entire world so i hope you enjoy seeing the uh slightly strange scenes going on down there but the main reason we're here today is to give you a concert of great great music but from this absolutely amazing instrument and i think as far as pipe bargains go they don't get much more beautiful and spectacular looking than this instrument it's a freestanding instrument almost we're setting this big archway here there's nothing underneath me there's nothing to the side of me and you can even walk behind and above the instrument and built by various builds over the year 1844 grain davidson then whitley of chester then william hill and then rush within draper in the 60s and it's still in an ongoing state of being changed and added to all the time you'll see that the main body of the instrument is here in this archway the main part i'll be playing straight with my head and a lot of the pedal sounds as well there's a choir organ at the side over there which is a little more distant which little sounds like clarinet we have a solo album which is right on the very top which has things like string sounds we'll have things like another clarinet oh we have a very very very grand tuber which you can definitely hear and you'll notice that behind the argument in the chapel behind is a set of pedal reads and open big open stops they're very low sounds you'll hardly hear them they're very i can feel them in the building but the big stops these go very low it's a good way of scaring visitors when they're not aware they're walking past them an incredible sort of spacious instrument an amazing sound we opened there with the magic flutes open show by mozart an incredibly exciting piece of music and um we're going to move straight on to a piece of well a religious piece really we're in a very important religious buildings i thought this was an appropriate piece it's the judex from mavita by guno now guno wrote this for the 1885 birmingham festival oratorios were very very popular in this country sort of religious works that were used for the concert hall now marin vita means death and life you might think it means life and death really but no guno said that in the grand scheme of the eternal order of things death comes before life he was a catholic he was almost ordained to be a catholic priest and of course had a strong belief that the afterlife was the most important journey that we're heading towards but before you get to that you get the judgements judex and that's the movement i'm going to play you now so once the human soul has reached death and has moved forward it goes through judgments before god you get this very imposing theme as you imagine god would sound and then we set up on this journey this absolutely beautiful beautiful romantic melody originally from orchestra chorus and organ this is a version i've done for argan solo and i think if the if this is what the afterlife sounds like then it sounds like it's going to be a an amazing journey to go on a judgment through this sound so this is judex by guno [Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Music] an incredibly beautiful piece of music and when you think of goono you won't think of it as such sort of romantic sounding music i hope you enjoyed that it works really well on this absolutely amazing instrument and we're going to move on to a piece by ponky ellie a composer you might not know by name but i can absolutely guarantee you you will know some of the tunes in this piece probably the best known ballet from any opera or any ballet that's ever been written and one of the most parodied pieces of music in the entire world you can decide where you know it from it's the dance of the hours now amelia carrie ponchieli he was professor of composition at milan conservatory where he taught people such as paccini and muscarini and he was also director of music at bergamo cathedral that i was supposed to do a concert there last october and hopefully i'll be going back there this october to play there which will be lovely to do and he wrote his opera legea conda and in that is the ballet the dance of the hours and as the title suggests it uses the hours of the day as the theme of the music we begin with dawn then morning evening and then back to daytime again this sort of reflects the struggle between darkness and light lots of little effects along the way and there's a little demonstration of this you will hear i'll give you now of a symbol stern a sound of bells inside the argon which rotates when you press a button or pull the stop out normally used for very joyful sort of easter or christmas occasions when you hear it very tinkly sound here it's a great opportunity to include it here so keep an ear out for that one um a beautiful piece of music as i say so i hope you enjoy this this is dance of the hours by omar khari panchayali [Music] foreign [Music] my [Music] me [Music] me [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] incredibly well known music i doubt it's ever been played in this setting but they have lots of concerts here big orchestral concert so it's a it's a great space for concerts and a great place to play that piece in i'm going to stay with the the symphonic theme you'll have noticed today the theme of the concert is the orchestral organ sound of a sort of symphonic organ sound because this argon has so many sorts of orchestral and warm sounds and as you know i do a lot of transcriptions and everybody'll have played every argument piece ever written on this instrument so it's nice to bring you different sounds that you wouldn't normally hear and i'm going to bring you brahms's third symphony the third movement the poco allegretto symphonies normally have a skirt so it here but brahms has this very sort of yearning slow movement in c minor very very well-known piece of music now i like ramsey's music i absolutely love it his organ pieces there's some corrals and some probably some fugues but i love his piano music he was a great great virtuoso pianist in fact when he was uh younger and learning the piano his first piano teacher was tired of him meddling in composition because he thought he could be a good performer if he just gave up messing around writing pieces of music and his parents thought the same thing well i think we're glad that he did actually write pieces down but it whenever he performed it was his performances that gained the praise rather than his actual compositions he must have been an absolutely incredible player and he had a great sense of humor he loved practical jokes a bachelor all his life he had a a saying uh of a phrase fry abba fro which means free but happy um which is a theme he used in the beginning of the third symphony of an f a f off fry albufro is the main theme which occurs throughout this whole piece even though it's free but happy you get these very sort of yearning poignant movements famous in the orchestral version of this sort of very sort of melancholy sound but never depressing like some composers who go really really heavy and dark brahms i always find he stays on the earth really with us and you can really relate to this sound but he's always quite a happy character in some ways and there's always some very light moments it uses the very sort of warm strings tremulence fox humans and the whole warm sound of this instrument so i hope you enjoy this this is the poco allegretto the third movement from brahms's third symphony [Music] to [Music] too [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] an incredibly beautiful and moving piece of music and um what i love about playing these orchestral pieces on the organ is trying to make this instrument and all these instruments into expressive instruments when you hear an orchestra this swell the vibrato and the flow of the sound we're dealing with instrument which is pipes wood metal mechanical things and you're trying to control that sometimes all around a building so hope it's giving you that impression and that's why people use these instruments and we've got a great one coming up for you now um we've reached the end of the concert but don't worry there's quite a bit to go yet because you've got an epic piece coming up uh i want to say thank you so much for watching today thank you for everyone at chester cathedral for making us so welcome philip bushworth the decks of music has been so welcoming and this instrument is so well looked after they have a great concert series here so do come along and come and hear this instrument for yourself in this amazing amazing space and hopefully i'll come back here and do something at some point again thank you to tom for filming and recording and of course most of all thank you for watching today now i'm going to finish with a little bit of a party piece in some ways it's wagner's tanheiser overture now i'm against ending things with overtures but this is an exception really they should begin the proceedings but even wagner said this piece was a little bit too much for his upper tanheiser and could be cut down when you do an opera performance so i think we're okay to finish with it today and you'll see why it uses an amazing technique in this transcription by edwin lemare called thumbing down this is where when you're using both hands and you've run out of digits to play and melodies you can use a thumb and go down to the next manual and use that to play a melody and this is one of the first pieces i tried to do this with people said it was impossible to play this piece it's one of the most difficult transcriptions i've ever tried to learn and so i thought i'd have a go at it about 10 or 11 years ago i first tried it and it's an amazing thing that your brain has to do by the time the big section at the end gets going you're playing scales down the keyboard with your right hand repeated notes with the fingers of the left hand the main melody with your thumb on here and then apart with your feet sometimes into two parts five or six things all going on at once and this is where organ transcriptions really come into their own and use an instrument like this you need full keyboards you need tubers and you need an absolutely amazing space of course this is a great great piece of music and very very famous because it's the pilgrims chorus and as i've said it's a very very difficult transcription but it should be enjoyable to listen to but you may have noticed today i've got a new pair of cufflinks on a very kind lady called mary bought me these amazing silver and amber cufflinks which i'm wearing today apparently the amber in them has a medicinal and magical properties which i think i might actually need for this final piece today so hopefully you'll be able to see them um and it sounds absolutely amazing here i've enjoyed rehearsing it so let's uh wish me luck now for this final piece we're bringing you more concerts soon hopefully um in the meantime thank you for watching today and this is wagner's tanheiser overture in the arrangement by edwin lemaire [Music] um [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] [Music] 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Channel: scottbrothersduo

Views: 72,770

Rating: 4.9548798 out of 5

Keywords: Chester Cathedral, Organ, Concert, Recital, Pipe Organ, Jonathan Scott, Organist, Chester, UK, Wagner, Mozart, Gounod, Brahms, Ponchielli, Orchestral, Classical Music, Arrangement, Dance of the Hours, Magic Flute, Overture, Judex, Symphony, Tannhauser, Orgue, Orgel

Id: YmmGkYbDWEk

Length: 59min 47sec (3587 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021