Customer Reviews

The Grand Organ, Sydney Town Hall

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The Sydney (Australia) Town Hall organ (Hill & Son, 1890) is a fine old 19th century style orchestral organ which was the world's largest when it was built in England and then dismantled and shipped to Sydney to adorn the fancy new town hall. It sported the first full-length 64-foot stop, the wood Contra Bassoon in the Pedal Division, a suggestion of Mr. Hill in his proposal. With six divisions, five manuals, and nearly 150 stops the organ is one of the world's large instruments, and its case is unusually beautiful as we see on the cover photograph.

Here it is expertly and artistically played by Willibald Guggenmos, a German organist with an active international career, in an unusually varied program of mostly 20th century works by English, French, American, and Swiss composers.

The Hollins "Triumphal March" is a stirring, well-crafted English march featuring the powerful lower stops of the organ. Guggenmos's own transcription of the Adagio from Saint-Saens's Third "Organ" Symphony reveals the tonal beauty and gentleness with which the organ can charm the ear. Paul Huber's toccata on the cathedral bells at St. Gallen is a familiar work displaying the fire and brilliance of the organ.

Rawsthorne's "Hornpipe Humoresque" will make you smile if you have any sense of musical humor at all: starting out with the familiar sailor's tune, he plays around until he's cleverly touched upon popular works by Bach, Vivaldi, and Widor and mock-heroically introduced "Brittania Rules the Waves"--all in only a bit over three minutes. Pietro Yon, an Italian-born American, offers in his "American Rhapsody" a similar potpourri of well-known tunes, but in this case they are American favorites (though you might wonder, since it starts out with the German "O Tannenbaum," justified as the American equivalent "O Maryland"). Edwin Lemare, a hugely successful organist of the turn of the century, shows how lovely the organ can sound in his transcriptions of "Londonderry Air" and "Aloha Oe," the old Hawaiian national anthem by Queen Liliuokalani.

Leo Sowerby presents another fiery, brilliant piece in his "Joyous March" and then Samuel Barber, another American, soothes us with the unmatchable beauty and peacefulness of his "Adagio for Strings", arranged for organ by Wm. Strickland.

Louis Vierne ends the program with the finale from his 6th Organ Symphony, again displaying the power and brilliance of the Hill Organ.

The recorded sound is excellent: the hall's reverberation is enough to enliven the sound, but not so much that it muddies it. For those accustomed to the (German or Dutch) baroque organ with its clear, sparkling, silvery sheen of sound this recording will be a decided change of pace, for the strength of this instrument is at the other end of the sound spectrum in its powerful and reedy bass stops, complemented by the warmth, color, charm, variety, and subtlety of its orchestral palette. This giant of an organ can be as gentle as a lamb!

I greatly enjoy this recording and find it a unique and delightful addition to my organ listening repertoire.

ADDENDUM: After submitting the above review I realized I'd neglected to point out a short glitch in my (new) copy of it: at the very end of the last track the final chord sounds and as the reverberation continues there's a sudden dropout of sound for a moment and then a kind of post-echo of the reverberation. It seems to be a manufacturing problem of some kind. It's annoying, but I still rate the CD at 5 stars for its unique content and artistry. (A possible fix would be to extract the tracks and edit the last one to remove or minimize the glitch, then burn the edited copy back to disk for your personal listening pleasure. That's what I did.)