Music and things

Since we’re out and about so much less than usual, I’m spending far too much time watching stuff on YouTube, slouched in my usual chair with the iPad on my thigh.  I happened the other day on a performance of Eugène Gigout’s Grand-Chœur Dialogué, a rather flashy piece I first met on a record of Nicolas Kynaston playing the Albert Hall organ.  It’s not a work of great finesse, though there is a little fugato section towards the end.  It does serve to show off the resources of a big instrument, so has a lot of immediate appeal.  Well, the performance I happened upon was recorded in St Paul’s, and the dialogue was between the horizontal trumpets above the west door and a pretty full organ over the choir.  Must have made the phrasing a bit difficult.  As is common with YouTube, once you’ve visited a particular subject, it now puts up at least one other take on the same thing every day.  Yesterday, it was a performance by two organists on the two organs of Antwerp cathedral.  (I didn’t know it had two, having always been too tight to pay the admission charge!).  Today, YouTube brings an arrangement for organ, brass and percussion, and still another arrangement for organ and brass ensemble.  And yet another creditable performance by a self-taught American organist who died suddenly, aged 24.

Being a bit reactionary in my musical tastes, I tend to prefer stuff played on the instrument it was written for.  But a number of exceptions reinforce this rule.  For example, I’ve enjoyed performances of Bach’s rather over-exposed Toccata and Fugue in d minor on harp, on handbells and even on a glass harmonica.  And going in the opposite direction, I’m enjoying Jonathan Scott’s arrangements for organ of popular orchestral pieces, very much the stock in trade of municipal organists in the early 20th century, and the reason why so many English town halls sport big, brassy four-manual organs.

We had a minor catastrophe yesterday.  Dislodged, probably, by vibration from the washing machine, a box of scrapers and sandpaper fell off its shelf in the garage, scratching the wing of Martyn’s car as it went.  I took some coloured polish to it today with a limited degree of success.  The car was very reluctant to start, however, so once I’d done with the polish, I took it for a run round a ten-mile circuit.  Shortly before I got home, a chap stopped me and asked me to back up a bit: he was ushering a vociferous cow back into her field.  ‘Come on, Daisy!  Good girl, Daisy’.  Smallish scale farming, I suspect.  We can occasionally hear cows from home.  It helps us to feel as though we live in a village rather than (more accurately) a suburb.  Anyway, the little circuit did its job: the car started a little more willingly after Daisy had been led through the gate.