St Andrew's Uniting Church, Gardiner

It's been a while since I last did a 'sights and sounds' entry here, so when I had a call from a funeral director last week I thought the engagement would provide the perfect opportunity.

The engagement was to play for the funeral of a musician.  These sorts of funerals are always challenging.  Most funeral families have limited musical literacy outside the scope of their usual radio station or  CD collection.  By contrast, a musician's funeral often comes with clear instructions, or at least a well-developed sense of where to go for choosing the music for prelude and postlude.  The funeral yesterday was especially challenging because the person had been the organist at the church where the service was held.  (As it happens, I was hired to cover for this person at Christmas a few years ago.)  My instructions were along the lines of "play some Bach, preferably a Vivaldi transcription or a cantata movement, anything by Elgar, Greig, or Karg-Elert, and make sure to include something by A.E. Floyd, whom she admired very much."

St Andrew's Uniting Church, Gardiner, is a prominent bluestone church located at the busy intersection of Burke and Malvern Roads.  Gardiner is a hamlet that takes in parts of East Malvern and Glen Iris, in much the way that Cremorne denotes the southern end of Richmond and Hawksburn is the eastern reach of South Yarra.  (We Melburnians do love to subdivide the suburbs!)

Prior to the founding of the Uniting Church in Australia, St Andrew's was part of the Presbyterian Church. Addendum: From May 2016 St Andrew's is now the spiritual home of the Indonesian congregation from Mulgrave Uniting Church. The future of St Andrew's was a bit of a live question when this entry was written in 2011, so it is good to see that a church presence has been able to be maintained in this very prominent location.

St Andrew's was originally built for a congregation in Carlton in the middle of the nineteenth century.  When the building became redundant in the middle decades of the twentieth century it was moved to serve the needs of a growing congregation in its present location.  The architecture is bulky and muscular: the church juts up on the crest of a hill, with the next ecclesiastical landmark on the horizon being the cupola of the dome that caps Our Lady of Victories in nearby Camberwell.  The tower houses a clock which chimes the hours.

The light interior boasts a large amount of woodcarving, stained glass and textile work.  Unusually for an ex-Presbyterian church, the sanctuary has stalls rather than chairs for the minister and elders.

I've often felt that there's something decidedly monastic about these arrangements!  The centre stall is decidedly reminiscent of an abbot's chapter house throne.  That said, the little brackets for the individual wine glasses is old-fashioned Presbyterian pragmatism at it's most endearing.

The present organ is the second one in the church at its present location.  The first was a 6-rank extension organ by Hill, Norman & Beard, which was accommodated in a chamber on the north side of the sanctuary (you can see the shape of it from the outside in the second photo above).  The present organ was built in 1973 by Fincham & Sons, and belongs to that period in the firm's history when it was embracing the principles of the Orgelbewegung.  This instrument expresses the influence through its positioning in a large shallow case that dominates the back wall of the church.

The console is located at the front of the church, near where the choir seating once was.  I recall the first visual impression this instrument made on me: it combines aspects of contemporary Fincham organs built for St Peter's, Eastern Hill (the case profile is identical), and St Francis's, Lonsdale Street (the treatment of the facade pipes, with stepped mouths and straight-line tops, is exactly the same here).  Of the three instruments, St Andrew's remains the least-altered.  St Peter's had a large amount of tonal finishing done on the Hauptwerk and Pedal divisions in 1996-97, while St Francis's replaced their Fincham with a Casavant in 2000.

One of the curious features of this instrument is the glass swell shutters on the front of the Swell/Brustwerk (another feature shared with the Lonsdale St instrument).  While it allows for the pipework to be seen, I'm not entirely sure this was wholly successful.  Part of this has to do with the gearing of the shutter motors: it has three positions, closed, open about 2 inches and fully open.  There's no scope to play with the first half-inch of opening, which is surely the most expressive phase of the shutter movement.  I'm not sure whether the organist at the time was a major fan of the back-to-Baroque movement, but the net effect of the limitations of the swell shutters is that the second division is more effective if you treat it as a positiv or brustwerk rather than a conventional swell, for which it does have the main ingredients.  Here's a run-down on the specification.

Great		Swell
Principal Rohrflute Octave Spitzflute Fifteenth Mixture Trompette	8 8 4 4 2 III 8	Salicional Gedeckt Principal Nazard Flautina Tierce Krummhorn Closed Horn Tremulant	8 8 4 2 2/3 2 1 3/5 16 8
Pedal		Couplers
Violone Subbass Principal Gemshorn Faggott	16 16 8 4 16	Great to Pedal Swell to Pedal Swell to Great Swell Suboctave to Great Swell Superoctave to Great

The console is generously-proportioned and shows that whoever oversaw the project gave at least some consideration to the ergonomics of playing the instrument.  I'm normally a bit dark on stop tabs when they're arranged like a row of teeth under the music desk, but here it works very well.  Each division has four pistons, settable using dipswitches.  Here is where I should make a public apology to the incumbent organist for messing with her pistons!

By now I'm sure you might be wondering how the whole thing sounds.  I did have the opportunity to make a quick practice tape while preparing for the funeral, so I thought I'd share something that was specifically requested.  The family were quite clear in wanting something of A.E. Floyd, the sometime organist at St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne.  For your listening delight I'm pleased to share his Chorale-Prelude on a Tune of Orlando Gibbons.  I recommend listening to the piece with headphones.