Organ recital with Caroline Cradock and John Kitchen

Join us for an exceptional organ recital as part of our Baroque Music Festival with Scottish organists Caroline Cradock and John Kitchen at Greyfriars Kirk, one of Edinburgh’s most beautiful concert spaces. The programme will celebrate some of the great French composers for the organ, including François Couperin and his Gloria of the Messe pour Les Paroisses, which will be performed with plainsong choir. Come to hear French Baroque music and hidden gems!

The rich and extensive repertoire of 17th- and 18th-century French organ music makes specific demands on the player. If these are not met and addressed, the music fails to make the effect intended by the composers. The first requirement is that the organ should have the appropriate stops for the music; all organs are of course different, and there are great national differences in organ styles. However, the Peter Collins organ here in Greyfriars was designed partly with performance of this area of French repertoire in mind, and so it offers the player almost ideal sounds. French organ composers—unlike those in the contemporary German tradition—specified exactly what stops they wanted for the individual pieces, often with great precision; the titles of the pieces often give these registrations. So what you will hear tonight is very close to the sounds intended by Couperin, Clérambault, Grigny and Corrette.

Certain aspects of performance style are also specific to this repertoire: how the many ornaments should be played, the use of notes inégales (pairs of unequal quavers) and so on. Much of this repertoire was intended to be played in alternation with sung plainchant, and we are introducing this aspect into the Couperin Gloria. We will do our best this evening to address these important issues which give such life to the music.