All about the Royal Festival Hall organ

What does your job as Organ Curator involve?

My role is to look after the interests of the pipe organs at Southbank Centre and to keep them in good order. As a consultant to the programming team I help shape the organ recitals and try to preempt questions which might arise in general programming work regarding the use of these instruments. There’s the big one in the Royal Festival Hall, of course – but did you know there’s one in the Queen Elizabeth Hall as well?  It lives under the stage in a kind of garage affair. It comes up on a lift, moves on a railway track and is the only pipe organ I know with a handbrake!

What will you be doing in preparation for our concert on 7 May – Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony?

I aspire to have made sure that the organ is in tip-top condition to allow the soloist to perform to the best of their ability. We have 7866 pipes in the Royal Festival Hall organ and they all need to be in tune. Of course, we can’t tune them all in one session, so looking after the organ is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge – we have to start at one end and work through it to make sure it is all in tune. Some parts need more regular attention than others, so I work with our expert tuners from Harrison & Harrison Ltd to develop a plan on what to tackle through the year.

What’s distinctive about the Royal Festival Hall organ?

When the organ was built in 1954 it was the first instrument in England to follow the philosophy of the so-called Organ Reform Movement.  This began in Germany with Albert Schweitzer who wanted to deepen his understanding of why organs built around 1900 lasted only a few years, and yet those built in the so-called Golden Age (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) were still in working order. He encouraged musicians and organ-builders to look back into history to find the sounds which composers such as Bach might have encountered in the organs they knew and played. As a result of these ideas, the tonal scheme of the Royal Festival Hall instrument is very much designed around enabling a wide range of repertoire to be played, including music from the Baroque and Classical eras. Its size means it is also capable of meeting a symphony orchestra and winning – as it is sometimes supposed to do in Romantic repertoire, such as in Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony.

How much detail does Saint-Saëns give in the score of his symphony about the sounds he wants from the organ, and how much is up to the organist or the conductor to decide?

Saint-Saëns doesn’t say too much about the stops he had in mind for the various musical textures he writes. He’s specific about dynamic levels and whether the organist should use their feet or not in different sections of the score. He notes that he wants the Voix célestes (‘Heavenly voices’) in the slow movement – it’s a specific set of stops which gently undulate together and have a string-like sonority. Organists know what he means – and in general we are trained to make decisions about which stops to use in specific repertoire, for certain dynamic levels, and in varied acoustic spaces. In general, conductors (in my experience) tend to comment on balance rather than choice of stops.  Of course, when the composer says fortissimo, it usually means ‘pull out all the stops’!

Saint-Saëns was a renowned organist – but of course composers have to learn to write for instruments they don’t play themselves. How would you advise an aspiring composer to learn to write well for the organ?

Part of training to be a composer probably means having more than a working knowledge of what a particular instrument is capable of.  Organs are somewhat peculiar in that no one example is the same as another. It can be exciting for a composer to stretch the boundaries of what is considered possible on any instrument – and the pipe organ is no exception. A mistake which is sometimes made is that composers write pitches which are actually below the range of the organ pedals.  It’s easy to confuse the pitches one wants to hear with the protocols of writing music on paper!

What concerts in the rest of the Philharmonia’s season catch your eye, and why?

There’s so much to choose from! I love Prokofiev; his music is paired with Stravinsky’s Firebird (18 May) and Petrushka (21 May) – what’s not to like? The Poulenc Organ Concerto can be heard on 25 May at the Bach Choir concert.  If you don’t know it, it’s worth hearing: the Keystone cops meet church architecture. It’s bonkers!

Dr William McVicker has been Organ Curator at the Southbank Centre since 1999, and oversaw the restoration of the Royal Festival Hall organ when the building was refurbished in 2007.  The work to the organ was completed in 2013.