Ffinch is the college organist at Cheltenham College and oversees daily organ performances in the college chapel. When I reviewed his last album, I noted that this must force him to make the organ as accessible as possible, to attract his younger audience.
This album seems to be an attempt to extend that to everyone else, as it is about the least “organy” album I’ve heard, and features “Life on Mars”, the Bowie song Ffinch was asked to play the day after the Thin White Duke popped his clogs.
It opens with Camille Saint Saëns’s “Danse Macabre”, Op. 40 (arr. Edwin H. Lemare), which everyone knows, as it must be played somewhere close to you every Halloween. (It is based on the French legend that Death packs a fiddle and comes to play at midnight on Halloween, causing the skeletons in the cemetery to crawl out of the ground for their annual graveyard dance party.) The interweb says it has been used in everything from a Jameson Whiskey advert to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and Alton Towers, too, I would suggest.
There’s a run of gentler tunes that at times could be ambient electronica, and in places suggests they are going to drift off into one of the (many) Harry Potter themes.
The “Nutcracker Suite” follows — which everyone knows — then a run from Marcel Dupré’s “Variations sur un Noël, Op. 20”, which are easy on the ear but the most organy of the sections.
“Life on Mars” is, well, “Life on Mars”, but it must have been a moving moment when he originally played it (or its original — this is a different arrangement) ten years ago. Indeed it was, as the person who requested it wrote: “Thank you for going the extra mile – your rendition was passionate and heartfelt. Several of the staff were in tears.”
Marcel Lanquetuit’s “Toccata” closes the album in lively fashion, giving Ffinch the chance of a proper workout.
It probably won’t get any young people queuing up for organ albums, even with Bowie, but fans of classical music who always fancied the organ but were deterred by the “high” sound should give it a listen.
Out on Divine Art, DDX 21147.
JMC
