Post-Procol Harum in the UK
Bach in Dorset, 8 July 2006
If a trip to see Procol Harum in Lulworth is not enough, on
the day after the concert, Saturday 8 July at 7.30pm, longstanding Procoholic
Will Fraser will give an organ recital in the beautiful village church of St
Gregory's in Marnhull, Dorset. Marnhull is about an hour's drive north of
Lulworth, a 37- mile journey (60km) through beautiful countryside (route
here!). Marnhull is
most famous as the home of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (read the
novel
starting here).
Will
intends to play several large pieces by that most procophilic of great
composers, Johann Sebastian Bach. There will be the famous Prelude and Fugue
in E flat major and the great Fantasia and Fugue in G minor. The
lesser-known but equally wonderful variations on the chorale Sei Gegrusset
Jesu Guteg, Bach's longest organ work, will fill the programme out with a
series of vignettes, each more complex than the last. Bach wrote it when he was
about the same age as Gary and Matthew et al were when they penned the
similarly ambitious and episodic In Held 'Twas in I. There will be a
couple of non-Bach pieces, including Jehan Alain's Litanies, a piece that
– though without an immediately obvious relationship to Procol Harum – is a
vigorous trip through the style and harmonic sense of France in the early
twentieth century.
Will Fraser first saw Procol Harum
at Shepherd's Bush in 1995. He struck up an immediate friendship with
Matthew Fisher, also a classically-trained organist and alumnus of Cambridge
University. In fact, Will twice played for Matthew's original teacher, the late
Nicholas Danby. Matthew sat up in the organ loft at
Westminster Abbey
when Will performed there, and a high point of Will's career was when Matthew
drove up to Cambridge to listen to him perform a Bach harpsichord concerto.
Matthew also guided Will through the potentially-disastrous
process of buying a Hammond organ, since the road to Hammond-Leslie bliss is
strewn with transistor amps and models without authentic tone generators. Will
eventually settled for an antique
Model AB, 1938, serial number 0003, coupled
with a Leslie 145. These are currently housed in his laundry room (see
illustration) where, occasionally, Will hikes up the distortion and offers up
blistering interpretations of the organ line in A Christmas Camel.
Currently back home in Dorset after almost a decade abroad
in the wilds of Nova Scotia and Mississippi, Will sees no better union than the
music of Bach and Procol Harum, and hopes that Procol fans will join him for
what promises to be a lovely evening.
Tickets are 6 pounds sterling on the door (probably to include a
glass of wine), a small price to pay for an evening soaking up fine music and
the unspoilt atmosphere of a Dorset village.
Procol dates in 2006
Online booking for Procol Harum at Lulworth Castle