Organ Concert at Christ Church, Brunswick, 7 August 2005

My first post as a fully-fledged organist was at Christ Church, Brunswick, where I worked from 2004 until mid-2008.
Christ Church is a unique place on many accounts: the building is highly unusual, the liturgy quite distinctive, and the organ groundbreaking.  This parish was the first in Melbourne to install an instrument built purely along classical-revival lines.  It is an excellent example of the work of Roger Pogson in his prime.

As young directors of music are wont to do, I put on a recital about eighteen months after I arrived.  Like most studious organists, I made a recording of the event for personal reference.  This recording only resurfaced during my recent removal.

It is interesting to listen to tapes like this at a distance of years.  My approach to performance has evolved and matured quite considerably, and you would expect that a recording a few years old would contain lots of things that I would now prefer to forget.

Strangely, that's not really how I see this recording.  There are a good number of things that were quite well-done, even if it's not exactly how I'd go about it right now.  There are a few pieces that I was performing publicly for the first time, so my ideas have moved on.  But most of it is basically good playing, which is the critical point for me.  There are many small things that make one blanch, but the totality is still quite acceptable.

Over the next little while I'll post items from the programme.  There was a lot of music, and the audience certainly heard a lot of colour from the instrument.

Here is the first item, Prelude & "St Anne" Fugue in E-flat [BWV 552] -- J.S. Bach.  To mix things up, I invited the congregation (woops! Audience) to sing the hymn tune on which fugue is based.