Chelmsford Cathedral's own Assistant Director of Music, Samuel Bristow, will be taking to the organ for our first Lunchtime Concert this week. Ahead of his performance, he shares some of his favourite performances and an insight into his repertoire.
Can you share some of your favourite performances?
I'm so lucky with the opportunities I've had over a decade of playing the organ professionally. Special highlights that spring to mind include the Sunday recital at St Paul's Cathedral in late October 2020, when I played a programme containing a message of hope in dark times, as it was the afternoon before we went into lockdown.
Undoubtedly An Astronaut's Playlist here in Chelmsford, which included my own transcription of Sam Ryder's Space Man in front of packed Cathedral, which was an atmosphere I'll never forget. Finally, a recital at Tewkesbury Abbey last year, a place particularly close to my heart, which included an arrangement from Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius in front of legendary Cathedral musician Dr Roy Massey, who's forgotten more about Elgar than I'll ever know!
Can you share some of the pieces you’ll be playing, and how you decided on your programme?
It's always a fun challenge to pick programmes here; whenever I do "away fixtures" in other places I tend to let the style of instrument guide me for what to play, prioritising what would sound particularly good on the stops available. Knowing our own Mander organ here so well, and being my home instrument on which I've played pretty much every musical style, the slate is pretty much blank!
Through hosting our lunchtime concerts every week and gathering feedback from them throughout the year, I hope I've developed a good understanding of what our audiences enjoy, and so have them at the forefront of my mind when deciding. Quite uniquely for me, Friday's recital features music mostly by living composers. I'll be opening the concert with my own composition, entitled Essex Paean, which I wrote earlier this year, followed by sumptuous works by Sumsion and Howells, two fellow Gloucestershire composers who have such a prominent role in my daily musical life.
There will also be a refreshingly cool set of variations on Amazing Grace by Iain Farrington, and a gorgeous new Lied by the young American composer Daniel Ficarri, the first time it's been performed in the UK. Finally I'll be playing some variations on Greensleeves by David Briggs, one of today's leading concert virtuoso organists. Plenty of great tunes and scrunchy harmonies to fend off any hint of Autumn blues!
As curator of the Lunchtime Concerts, what have been some of your favourite performances?
All of us on the Friday lunchtime concerts team agree full-heartedly one of the greatest strengths of this series is the variety week by week. With that in mind, it is truly impossible to have favourites! In mid-November 2023 John Chillingworth and Tim Carey provided, at the last minute, a memorably poetic programme for cello and piano, which was a perfect fit for Remembrance.
A little more recently, as an example of how you can always discover new things, Ophelia Gordon gave an extraordinary recital of piano works by Nikolai Kapustin, a composer I'd never encountered before. It was astonishing playing and I've bought several scores of his music since as a direct consequence, and I'm eagerly awaiting the upcoming release of her CD of the same music, which she promoted at the concert here.
Finally, as a perfect embodiment of the community feeling we have here, it was terrific to be able to accompany soprano Bethany Shordon in a wide-ranging programme of opera arias. It felt a terrific demonstration of Bethany's talents as a singer which had been nurtured during her many years as a chorister here and the atmosphere was positively buzzing.
Samuel's lunchtime concert will take place on Friday 5 September at 12pm, with tea and coffee served from 11.30am.
Photo: Ash Mills 2022