Philip Scriven began his third monthly Tuesday lunchtime organ series on 10th September with a programme entitled ‘Rule, Britannia!’. This year each programme will have a different theme but Phil ‘Mr Cycles’ Scriven could not resist adding the thread of Franck’s organ works to the mix, so this time there was a Belgian heart to the eight Anglo-Irish pieces.
It is frustrating for those of us who have to teach that these concerts are really only fully open to visitors, but a goodly crew of organ buffs and friends of the school, even a former Director of Music (I think that was David Hansell?) ensured a warm reception for our genial genius of the keyboard. By hook and crook I managed this time to hear six items and part of all the other three, and an especial highlight was the transcription of a Thalben-Ball improvisation, ‘Elegy’. Also a special treat was to hear again (not long after his schoolboy friend Christopher Herrick’s performance last year) the Serenade that OC and former Director of Music Derek Bourgeois composed for his own wedding, with its amusing trip-ourselves-up rhythms.
The concert, appropriately so, following close on from the last night of the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, began with Elgar and ended with Walton’s ‘Crown Imperial’. The next concert is on Tuesday October 1st (a Baroque programme that will especially suit the Mander organ) and the School would love to welcome more local parents and friends of Cranleigh to the rest of this series.
PJL
