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	Interview with Michael Bawtree	96 Tage her
	Michael Bawtree will be the organ soloist in Saint-Saëns' Organ Symphony at our Kelvingrove Concerts next weekend. He kindly has answered some questions we posed him about his instrument and his brilliant and varied musical career. Can you remember the first time you heard an organ play? It must have been at my local church in Devon when I had just started playing the piano. I always envied the organist there - all that noise he could make, and he didn't have to listen to the long sermons either, being hidden away. But he said I couldn't play the organ until I had Grade 5 piano - but it was probably because my legs were too short. Who or what got you into playing the organ? My grandmother was an avid bell-ringer, so I spent many hours in and around churches when young. The organist at her church in Surrey, Stephen Wright, allowed me to play before and after services - my first attempts at playing in public! What organs did you learn on? Who were your teachers? I was lucky to go to a school with a fine chapel organ (Sherborne School in Dorset), where I had my first proper lessons from Paul Ellis, an inspiring musician. From there I was awarded an organ scholarship to Cambridge where I studied with Anne Page, an Australian teacher who's famous for her harmonium performances! More recently, I studied with Margaret Phillips, who had coincidentally opened the English Organ School in a converted chapel in the tiny village of Milborne Port, just a mile down the road from my parents' home in Somerset. Of all the organs you have played, what is your favourite, and of all the ones you haven't, which would you like to play most? I have been lucky to be invited to play some extraordinary instruments in the UK and abroad. Every organ is unique - designed for the requirements, architecture and acoustic of its situation. This means that for every performance the organist has to ‘re-orchestrate' the pieces he is playing. Different organs are also suited to different types of music. My favourite ‘orchestral' organ is at Trinity Church in Boston (http://www.trinitychurchboston.org/a.... It has every orchestral colour imaginable - I've played many transcriptions there, including my own version of Tchaikovsky's ‘Sleeping Beauty'. My favourite ‘baroque' organ is a rebuild of a North German instrument from around 1700, which is housed in a church in Gothenburg, Sweden. I was invited to play it earlier this year - and loved it! (check it out here) . I would love to play the organ at Symphony Hall in Birmingham, and the Klais organ at Cologne Cathedral (picture here) which is suspended from the roof! Have you played the Kelvingrove organ before? Since the museum reopened after its refurbishment, the organ has been used almost every day for free, lunchtime concerts given by organists from near and far. I have performed one of these recitals, and loved both the warm, soft sounds of the instrument and of course its spine-tingling, majestic fortissimo. Do you wear shoes to play? If so, what sort? I have a pair of organ shoes from America, made by Organmaster. You send them your foot measurements, along with an outline of your foot. Crucially, an organ shoe must have very thin soles and be as narrow as possible so you only play one note at a time. Ideally it should also have quite a high heel - so often organists will buy dance shoes, which are very similar. My American shoes have been very reliable friends - except for one instance when I was giving a recital in Edinburgh. The heel fell off less than an hour before the concert, leaving me with two nails sticking out. After a quick visit to Timpson's, some rapid gluing, all was well and they've never been better! Organ lofts can be strange places. What's the oddest thing you've found in one? Organ lofts are indeed strange places - very often positioned high in a church or cathedral, far away from choirs, conductors and priests. When I was Assistant Organist at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Suffolk, the organ was accessed by a narrow 50-step spiral staircase - I had a telephone, and a rather antiquated harness I was supposed to use to lower myself over the edge if there was a fire. Cathedral organ lofts are very much the organist's office - I've seen televisions, computers, coffee machines, a sofa and even a drinks cabinet. Sometimes the hardest thing to find in an organ loft is the ‘on' switch for the instrument, often hidden away behind piles of music or even inside the instrument. Who are your favourite composers for the organ? Bach, Buxtehude, Messiaen, the Czech composer Petr Eben and English composer Judith Bingham. What's your favourite organ piece? ‘Four Biblical Dances' by Petr Eben, who died in 2007. Wonderfully colourful pieces, full of fun, surprises and rhythmic virtuosity. Audiences love his music, and it's great to play too (some details can be found here). And your favourite fugue? I'm afraid I can't narrow that down to just one! I'm a great fan of the quirky fugal writing of Dietrich Buxtehude and his seventeenth-century contemporary Nicolas Bruhns - I'd love to have had a beer with both of them. More recently, Maurice Duruflé's Fugue sur le nom de Alain is a wonderful piece, based on the letters of the name of his friend Jehan Alain, who was killed in 1940 in the Second World War. What would be on the repertoire list for your fantasy Evensong? There's such a huge amount of music in the Anglican Cathedral repertoire that it's hard to choose just a few pieces. Each liturgical season has its highlights too. However, this selection would keep me very happy, even if the service ended up being very long! Introit: O clap your hands together (Orlando Gibbons) Preces & Responses: Kenneth Leighton Psalm 121: Sir Henry Walford Davies Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis: setting for St Paul's Cathedral by Herbert Howells Anthem: Rejoice in the Lamb (Benjamin Britten) Organ voluntary: Prelude and Fugue in D major BWV 532 (Johann Sebastian Bach) Being able to improvise is still an important thing for a cathedral organist to be able to do - they are perhaps the only trained classical musicians nowadays who are expected to develop this skill. What inspires you when the time comes to extemporise at the keyboard? What goes through your head? Improvisation is an art in itself. French organists are particularly good at it, as their training concentrates on this skill above learning repertoire. They will quite happily improvise a four-movement symphony. In a cathedral context, improvisation is often used to ‘cover' events within the service - processions, collections, fanfares. I will always try to reflect the mood of the moment and make use of appropriate tunes that people will recognize ... though I have been known to sneak ‘Happy Birthday' into an improvisation, but nobody noticed! Organists are not quite the only classical musicians required regularly to improvise: my colleagues at Scottish Ballet play non-stop for 75 minutes every morning for the dancers' class (warm-up session) without a note of music in front of them. What else do you play? My various jobs all require me to play the piano a lot - I work for Scottish Ballet and accompany many of their rehearsals - but I used also to play the cello (not very well), and was once spotted playing double bass in an orchestra at university. I have spent this summer working at an opera festival in France where - in addition to my job as repetiteur and assistant conductor - I helped out the percussionist in the orchestra for Madama Butterfly - that certainly helped me appreciate the art of counting bars rest! And, lastly, are you going to pull out all the stops for Saint-Saëns' Organ Symphony at our Kelvingrove Concerts?! Very probably - although possibly not all at the very same moment! Not all organ stops work well sounding together, just as some ingredients don't work well combined in a recipe. I can be pretty sure that the final few pages of the Symphony will be exciting!
	geschrieben von RSno