Hastings Unitarian Meeting Place, 2 April 2016
It has been almost eighteen months since Stephen Page’s last series of concerts at the Unitarian Meeting Place and there was a large audience eagerly anticipating a programme made up of rare and more familiar items.
He opened with a number of works written somewhat before the 1760 Snetzler he was playing – Purcell’s Trumpet Tune together with its Almand and a Voluntary in D by John Alcock. This latter piece had the easy charm of a work for mechanical clock. Although the organ is not really suited to larger works, Stephen has made many adaptations over the years to enable us to hear works which were originally composed for much larger instruments. He played an arrangement of Bach’s Prelude & Fugue in C minor BWV549 which has a very dark tone to the fugue and followed this with the more positive tones of the chorale Herzlich thut mich verlangen –better known to most by its English translation as O sacred head surrounded.
He has played a large amount of Handel on this organ over the years and it is an ideal instrument for the composer. Today we heard movements from The Water Music before two brief pieces by Samuel Wesley. In his introduction Stephen noted that he had a date in the score of the Wesley which reminded him that he had first played the piece at the Unitarians in 1993 when, in his youth, he had asked if he could play the organ and had been encouraged to do so.
Flor Peters’ Aria brought us rather more up to date with its slightly acidic beauty and was followed by Weckmann’s Praeambulum a 5 vocum. It is the composer’s 400th anniversary this year and we will hear more from him as the series progresses.
The final section was in a lighter vein with two dances from Praetorius, Elgar’s Salut d’amour, Gordon Young’s Prelude in a Classic Style and concluding with a great favourite – Abe Holzmann’s Blaze Away.
The next concert at the Unitarians is on Saturday 2 July, but you can hear Stephen again in two weeks – Saturday 16 April @ 2.30pm – when he plays at His Place, Robertson Street, Hastings, for the Book Launch of Vol3 of Organs of 1066 Country.