PREVIEW: 45 Minutes of organ music

45 Minutes of Music @The Meeting House, University of Sussex, Brighton.

The increasingly successful series of 45 Minutes of Music @ the Meeting House continues on February 28. There are four monthly concerts on the last Wednesday (except March) of each month till May. All start at 12 noon (March’s concert is on Wednesday 21).

The series is performed by the internationally acclaimed concert organist and University Organist, D’Arcy Trinkwon, who is acclaimed as one of the outstanding virtuoso musicians of his generation. He is also Organist of Worth Abbey.

These fascinating, relaxed and informal concerts include interesting verbal introductions from D’Arcy who explains details and background of each piece of music, to help make the music accessible to even those new to great organ music. The concerts are aimed to be interesting and accessible to everyone, and the growing audiences indicate that they are!

The organ in the Meeting House is one of the finest organs in the South East and is also one of the iconic instruments of its period; built in 1966 by Grant, Degens and Bradbeer, its futuristic design still looks avant-garde today.

It was recently fully restored by Clevedon Organs with the addition of a very modern mobile console which allows the audience to watch everything the performer is doing.

The Winter-Spring series 2018 is called Fantasia!.

After the technical gymnastics and wizardry of the last series (‘Pedal Power – See what feet can do!’) D’Arcy takes us on a fantastical journey exploring fantasias written for the organ over five centuries. As always, there’s a huge variety of music – from Elizabeth I’s time to the present.

Musically a fantasia may be described variously as: ‘a free musical composition structured according to the composer’s fancy, a musical composition with a free form and often an improvisatory style, or a musical composition based on several familiar tunes and a thing composed of a mixture of different forms or styles’