The Oxford Book of Ceremonial Music for Organ, Book 2

ISBN-13: 9780193528369 / Angielski

Robert Gower

Opis

The second Oxford Book of Ceremonial Music for Organ is a practical collection of repertoire covering a wide range of uses, from formal public events to more private occasions. The music is stylistically varied, encompassing both flamboyant extravagance and restrained solemnity. Selected with players of intermediate to advanced ability in mind, the collection includes established favourites and attractive new arrangements of well-known works, alongside newly commissioned pieces.

Recenzje

This most welcome second collection, comprising no fewer than 25 individual pieces from a wide range of composers from J. S. Bach to Gabriel Jackson, offers items which are appropriate for almost any occasion where ceremonial organ music is required, presented in performing editions which will earn the gratitude of all organists. The presentation is of Oxford's customary immaculate manner, and amongst the well-known pieces . . . are such unusual (but enormously relevant and effective) pieces as Reger's Fugue on the British National Anthem and Sousa's Washington Post march. One surely cannot find a volume of comparable quality anywhere else â apart from in Book 1, that is. Most comprehensively recommended.

O autorze

On retirement from a teaching career spent successively at St Paul's Boys' School, Barnes, Radley College, Oxfordshire, and Glenalmond College, Perthshire, (where he was also a Housemaster and Senior Tutor), Robert Gower worked as Organist at St Barnabas Catholic Cathedral, Nottingham, before moving briefly to the most northerly parish in the Church of England at Berwick-upon-Tweed. Returning to Scotland so as to be nearer to family, he is now Director of Music at Dundee Parish Church. Robert's commitment to English 20th-century repertoire is reflected through his founding and leadership of the Percy Whitlock Trust between 1981 and 2016 and in his longstanding Chairmanship of the Gerald Finzi Charitable Trust, from which he retired in 2022. He enjoys transcribing music for organ (with a wide range recently embracing both Leroy Anderson and Maxwell Davies) and in liturgical composition, completing a three-year cycle of responsorial psalms for the Church Music Society.