Advertising for a new nanny

The primates of the Anglican Global South grouping have written to the Crown Nominations Commission overseeing the appointment of the new Archbishop of Canterbury.  The letter has been published in the Telegraph (UK) and on The Lead.

On reading the letter, I couldn't help feeling this might be apt...

Doing some cooking

Every now and then, I end up playing the organ for some intriguing occasions.  Funerals and weddings are pretty normal fare, but it's rare to be asked to work up a day's worth of music.  One of these latter types of invitation landed on my mailbox a few months ago, so today I found myself returning to an old haunt to help entertain the punters at St Peter's, Eastern Hill, for the National Trust Open House weekend.

Putting a large amount of music together isn't a hard task in itself -- for me, the biggest question is how to limit the material.  Fifteen years of producing the goods on a weekly basis means a big repertoire, although today I tried to focus on a blend of complete works with a good dose of lollipops.

One of set of the lollipops resulted in a flash mob.  I had a set of pieces focusing on John Stanley and G.F. Handel.  For a lark I decided to include Theodore Dubois's transcription of the Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah.  The group of Stanley voluntaries in the first part of the set ended up gathering an audience response, so I was half-expecting some sort of a response when I got to the Handel piece at the end.  By about halfway through the chorus I could hear the building filling up, and when I got to the short fugue I found I suddenly had an impromptu choir joining in.  What a thrill!

Happy Bastille day!

Mood music

Here is Pablo Casals playing the last two movements of Bach's first Gamba Sonata.

I first heard this recording in 1997, although I don't know much about the pianist.  Casals had recently come onto my radar via a documentary about his life.

These two movements catch a good amount of the Casals approach to Bach, and I still refer back to this recording when working on the G major trio sonata (same as the second movement in this video, but rescored for the organ).  Casals gives this such a deeply musical reading, taste and fashion in early music performance techniques just melts into insignificance.

Huzzah for the Higgs Boson!

Humanity has entered a new era, with the isolation of the Higgs Boson.

Here's a quick and (relatively) simple explanation, for anyone still wondering what all the fuss is about.