![]() ![]() Simon Preston performs at Yale University in New Haven, Conn.Ī few years later, those same golden fingers came to play a recital in Milan, where I was desultorily passing a year on a bursary to study, for one last time, organ with the titolario of the Basilica San Simpliciano. What I struggled with, he made to sound maddeningly easy. I had borrowed a recording of Simon Preston, whom I’d read about in a magazine for young musicians, playing it on the magnificent Marcussen organ of the Dom in Lübeck. I think it was the great A-minor concerto BWV 593, and I was having trouble specifically with a dreadful spot in the third movement where, in the last concertino episode, Bach calls on both hands to alternate fast-moving chords in semiquavers (organists will know exactly which part I’m talking about). ![]() Bach’s organ transcriptions of a concerto from Vivaldi’s L’Estro Armonico. In the midst of one of these pathetic episodes I was struggling through one of J.S. Not knowing much else other than what I was learning in my piano lessons, I acquired a rudimentary command of the organ and devoured the music on that bookshelf, finding recordings of what I couldn’t play - which was most of it - in the listening room of the local library.Īs I went through the stages of adolescence with varying degrees of angst, I occasionally made attempts at being a more serious organist. Bach, various bits of kitsch in organ arrangement - Sullivan’s Lost Chord, the minuet from Don Giovanni, and so on. In the little bookcase behind the organist’s bench were stacks of organ music donated by a music-loving member of the English-speaking congregation and somehow relegated to our little chapel.Ī greatly stained set of the complete works of Buxtehude, the “great” E-minor Praeludium of Nicolaus Bruhns, scattered volumes from the old Straube and Germani editions of J.S. But in an alcove behind the lectern was a wheezy electric organ with several of its stops malfunctioning, and for whatever reason it caught my attention. Of the chapel’s piano which I am sure hadn’t been tuned since the days of John Calvin himself, the less said the better. Later on, as he found out that I was taking piano lessons, the pastor then assigned me to a sort of general piano accompaniment duty intended to give some sense of order to the haphazard hymn-singing. He handed me a copy of the Standard King James, which I read in the back of the chapel behind two fake potted plants as I waited for the service to end the poetry of its severe imprecision was a boon to a child growing up with adults for whom English was a second language. Our sympathetic American pastor noticed my boredom during the services and did me two favours that proved invaluable to my subsequent life. ![]() The services were a mixture of lessons largely from the Old Testament meant to connect to the sensibilities of converts from Islam and exhortations about Christ’s loving mercy for a people who had seen and experienced more than they’d ever dare to speak of. Our congregation met on Sunday afternoons in a minor chapel down the hall from the church library. Whether out of genuine faith or from a need to give succour to their pain, a good many of them, my parents included, joined the Iranian congregation of a local Presbyterian church whose head pastor happened to have been a missionary in Iran and whose family spoke Persian. To be an Iranian - whether adult or child - in the 1980s was to be perpetually on the defensive, and the older people I grew up around looked forever worried and tired and somehow quietly, even patiently, ill at ease in their new country. I g rew up in an American suburb where virtually all of our friends and acquaintances were people who had fled Iran following the catastrophe of 1979. ![]() To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. This article is taken from the July 2023 issue of The Critic. ![]()
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