On the 28th of June 2024, I had the pleasure of performing a recital at the Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua (Basilica di Sant’Antonio di Padova) during the eighth edition of the Bologna Summer Organ Festival organised by the music association, “Fabio da Bologna”....
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Autobiographical Recollections of Charles-Marie Widor Edited and translated by John R. Near Boydell and Brewer / University of Rochester Press, 2024 ISBN 9781648250866 / 298 pp / £85 (hard copy), £25 (ebook) Reviewed by Robert James Stove Brash to the nth degree will...
Jusepe Ximénez: Obra de Ileno de Premier Tono; Sacris Solemnis/Garcia Baylo (?), Pedro Pifant? (1473): Vexilla Regis/Andrés de sola: Registro alto de Primer Tono/Melchar Robledo: Domine Iesu Christe/Sebastián Aguillera de Heredia: Tiento grande de Cuarto Tono; La...
American organist and organ scholar of Westminster Abbey, Carolyn Craig has been appointed Junior Fellow at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, part of Birmingham City University. She will take up the appointment in January 2024. Originally from Knoxville, Tennessee, and...
The third edition of the Dutch 'International Martini Organ Competition Groningen' (IMOCG) will take place in the summer of 2024, in the week of 28 July to 3 August in the Dutch town of Groningen. This time, the competition will feature three monumental organs. After...
Peter Dickinson died at the age of 88 on June 16, led a distinguished multifaceted career of over six decades as performer, academic, author and editor. His prolific writings and his compositional oeuvre in many genres radically espouse the postmodern aesthetic at the...
The International Kaija Saariaho Organ Composition Competition, organised to celebrate Helsinki Music Centre Concert Hall’s new Rieger organ that is to be finished in the autumn of 2023, received 98 participating compositions from all over the world. The jury, chaired...
The leading choral education programme in the United Kingdom expands to tackle declining engagement with music at state schools. Recently, the National Schools Singing Programme [NSSP], an ambitious music education initiative covering the majority of the UK’s Catholic...
The Royal School of Church Music (RSCM) and Society of Women Organists (SWO) are hosting a joint Come and Sing event, showcasing new music written by female composers, on Saturday July 15 at St Giles Cripplegate, London EC2Y 8DA. The workshop is led by Katherine...
Salisbury Cathedral School is proud to announce the launch of a new pipe organ scholarship programme, the first in a UK preparatory school. The new ‘Griffiths Chapel Organ Scholarships’, will support two organ scholars during Upper Prep, school years 7 and 8,...
Jens Korndörfer leads a busy career as performer, educator, and church musician; he has performed to critical acclaim at prestigious venues and festivals such as Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, the Montreal Bach Festival, the Cathedrals in Washington, Berlin,...
Benjamin Sheen has accepted the post of Director of Music at Jesus College, Cambridge. He will join the College on 1 January 2023, succeeding Richard Pinel, who has been appointed Director of Music at St Mary’s Bourne Street in London. Ben currently holds the post of...
Details of Bach and Friends: The Orgelbüchlein Completed series presented by the Royal College of Organists and sponsored by Professor Christopher Wood. This will comprise the following ten events: Saturday 24 September 2022 Temple Church, 10am - ‘Laws and Canons’...
A two manual Vincent Woodstock practice instrument has been installed in the Song School at Peterborough Cathedral. The organ was constructed in 2011 and became available when its owner, Simon Johnson, moved from his role as Organist at St Paul’s Cathedral to become...
It is no secret that music education in the UK has suffered as a result of cuts in budgets, and the pandemic has only further reduced opportunities for British children to engage with music. It is vital that music education survives in schools, if not for the...
Sixteen year old Ivan Deb has won the first Aprahamian Scholarship for young organists which includes a brand new two-manuals-and-pedals home organ, on which he can practise. The Arabesque Trust, which set up the scholarship to help visually impaired young organists,...
The 11th Northern Ireland International Organ Competition (NIIOC) will take place in Armagh from 21–23 August 2023, returning to the cathedral city where it was founded for the first time since the pandemic.
The competition jury will be chaired by the Canadian organist Isabelle Demers, who has an international reputation as a recitalist and recording artist and is associate professor of organ at McGill University, Montréal. She will be joined by Daniel Moult, head of the organ department at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and by regular jury member David Hill, artistic director of the Bach Choir, London, the Yale Schola Cantorum, Connecticut and of the Charles Wood Summer School, which runs concurrently with the organ competition.
For this year only the upper age limit for entrants has been extended to 22, because of the disruption to the competition schedules caused by Covid-19. In future years the age limit will return to 21.
The last in-person edition of the NIIOC took place in Armagh in 2019. The pioneering tenth NIIOC in 2021 took place online, with competitors submitting video recordings of themselves playing their choice of instruments near their homes around the world under recital conditions for adjudication. It was won by Laura Schlappa from Germany.
The tenth anniversary of the competition in 2022 saw all ten senior first prize-winners taking part in joint recitals in London and Belfast and individual recitals across Northern Ireland, with 2013 winner Richard Gowers premiering a new work by Grace-Evangeline Mason commissioned for NIIOC by the Commission for Victims and Survivors.
The Senior and Intermediate sections of NIIOC 2023 take place in St Patrick’s Church of Ireland Cathedral, Armagh and the Junior Competition in St Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church, Armagh. Full details of the monetary prizes and recitals, and opening and closing dates for entries, will be announced on Monday 17 April.
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