St Mary’s Cathedral is opening its Grand Organ to the public this season with a four-part concert series, held on Sunday afternoons from August to November.
It brings together a recitalist from the Sydney cathedral, two of the Cathedral’s own musicians, one of the country’s leading saxophonists, and the youngest players from its Junior Organ School.
A visitor from Sydney opens the series
Simon Niemiński, Assistant Director of Music at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, plays the first recital on Sunday 9 August at 2.30pm.
London-born, he trained at the Royal College of Music, at Cambridge and as Organ Scholar of York Minster, and has since recorded thirteen solo albums and been heard on BBC Radio and American broadcasts.
Organists’ Review once described his playing as “utterly convincing.”
His Perth program travels a long way, from Bach and Fela Sowande’s setting of the spiritual Go Down Moses to Max Reger’s demanding Symphonic Fantasia and Fugue, ‘The Inferno’, and takes in his own arrangement of Korngold’s Marietta’s Lute Song.
It also carries a Perth connection: two works by C. Edgar Ford, who was Organist of St Mary’s Cathedral from 1941 to 1961.
The organ meets the saxophone
On Sunday 20 September at 2.30pm, the Cathedral’s recently appointed Master of Music, Dominic Perissinotto, is joined by saxophonist Matthew Styles for a program written and arranged for the two instruments.
Perissinotto has spent much of his career making the case for the organ beyond the liturgy.
He founded the Pipe Organ Plus series, which ran for 18 years, during a long tenure at St Patrick’s Basilica in Fremantle, and more recently held the post of Cathedral Organist at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Brisbane before returning to Perth.
A Churchill Fellow, he studied at the Royal College of Music in London and was Organ Scholar at Westminster Cathedral.
Styles is one of Australia’s most sought-after saxophonists, equally at home in classical, jazz and contemporary music.
A Churchill Fellow and Doctor of Music, he founded Western Australia’s first university saxophone program and has appeared as principal saxophone with orchestras including the West Australian Symphony.
Together the pair move from Milhaud’s Scaramouche and Mozart to Charles Ives’s Variations on America and the familiar Albinoni Adagio.
Perth’s Principal Organist takes the console
Holly Broadbent, Principal Organist at St Mary’s Cathedral, gives the third recital on Sunday 8 November at 2.30pm.
She returned to Perth after completing a Master of Music in organ performance at Yale University, where she studied with James O’Donnell and won two prizes for organ performance, and she is a composer as well as a performer.
Her program looks to France and to the present day, from Charles Tournemire and Nadia Boulanger through living composers Pamela Decker and Ghislaine Reece-Trapp, and closes with Maurice Duruflé’s variations on the Veni Creator.
The next generation of Perth organists
The series ends on Sunday 29 November at 2pm with students of the St Mary’s Cathedral Junior Organ School: Kai Laird, Ryan Zhang, Sebastian Jennings, Jacob Huynh, Meldon Pinto, Elizabeth d’Castro, Peter d’Castro and Joshua Crestwell.
For several of them it will be a first public performance on the Cathedral’s organ.
Admission is free.
How to attend
Across the season the series sets out to show the range of the organ, from Bach to the Romantic works of Reger and Korngold and on to music being written today, all on one of Western Australia’s finest instruments. Recitals begin in the early afternoon at St Mary’s Cathedral, Perth.
Standard tickets are $40, with concessions and reduced prices for Organ Society members, under-25s and under-18s, and the Junior Organ School concert is free.
Bookings can be made at www.trybooking.com/DNIWX