Introducing Handel's Organ — Transcript

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1. 0:19Here we have a wonderful copy of a German chamber organ by Robin Jennings,
2. 0:24one of the finest instruments available within the UK because it has such
3. 0:29variety of pipe work on it that allows it to blend with instruments but also
4. 0:34take a solo role. This organ's fairly close to what Handel himself would have
5. 0:38understood as an organ in Germany, in Italy too to a certain extent and in
6. 0:45England where there were quite a large number of German organ builders and they
7. 0:50copied the German style a lot. If one thinks about the organ in the late 17th
8. 0:56and early 18th century it's probably the most complicated form of machinery and
9. 1:00the most important human artifact one can think of at the time and because of
10. 1:05that I think it was thought to embody so much of the human and godly spirit, it
11. 1:10tries to sort of encompass all the sounds that you might have in an orchestra
12. 1:14something of the vocality of the human voice
13. 1:17obviously the lovely tone of singing but also the notion of everything belonging
14. 1:23together, the instrument harmonizing as a whole.
15. 1:29Handel was always keen to promote the organ in the context of the English
16. 1:35church and concert scene so he actually devised the notion of introducing an
17. 1:41organ to the theatre which was quite a novelty in the early 18th century and in
18. 1:46his oratorio performances actually put in concertos during the intervals of the
19. 1:51oratorios to show off his own skill as an organist but also I think to promote
20. 1:56the organ. He had several colleagues in the organ building world who built
21. 2:01wonderful instruments with very long mechanisms that allowed him to play at
22. 2:06the front of the orchestra and play the pipes which were at the back of the
23. 2:09orchestra so it was quite a complicated instrument, a style of instrument
24. 2:13that's never been done since in fact we're not quite sure how they did it.
25. 2:21While this organ is in many respects based on 18th century models
26. 2:26particularly German ones, there's one big difference between then and now and
27. 2:31that's back in in the time of Handel and his colleagues they would have had to
28. 2:37have a boy to pump it to keep the air up. Now we have electric blowers so
29. 2:43it's much easier to have the organ on but it does make you think about how
30. 2:47they must have practiced how they would have had to employ somebody even to
31. 2:51practice an organ of this kind so they probably used different instruments like
32. 2:54clavichords and harpsichords to actually get the notes as it were and
33. 2:58then came onto the organ when they could afford to pay somebody to pump the thing.
34. 3:03There are two basic organ sounds for organs that are relatively small
35. 3:09that don't have reed pipes and the first is the flute sound which is
36. 3:14literally like a flute. Here we can have it for the the third movement of the G
37. 3:19minor concerto.
38. 3:35That's the gentlest sound of the organ beautiful, beautiful flute like sound and
39. 3:39then we have what in Germany is called a principle sound which is the main sort
40. 3:44of singing organ sound. In England it's often called the diapason and it's the
41. 3:49sort of noble organ sound that you so often associate with Handel and other
42. 3:53composers of the Baroque.
43. 4:07Beautiful, beautiful sort of sound and the other thing about an organ is that
44. 4:11you can build up chorus work both up to sort of brilliant solo sounds such as in
45. 4:17the fast movement of organ concertos.
46. 4:31and so on, so it's lovely, it's like the full string orchestra playing together,
47. 4:35violins, beautiful articulation and that's another good thing about this
48. 4:40specific organ is the action allows you to do so many little subtleties of note
49. 4:45lengths but the other thing the organ allows you to do is to build up a sort
50. 4:49of chorus as the piece goes on and that's particularly useful here when you
51. 4:54have a variation set so you might start with just the diapason sound
52. 4:59and the equivalent sound an octave higher to give it a bit more brilliance.
53. 5:21and then you could add a little bit more, a 2-foot to that for the next variation.
54. 5:40and then for the final one we've got some very high pipes, very small pipes
55. 5:44which give us a most brilliant sound.
56. 6:05so that's the sort of fastest speech of the organ you can hear, very very precise but
57. 6:10also brilliant in sound. So even though it's a very small unit you have a huge
58. 6:15range of sounds which in a sense mimics the entire orchestra.