Toccata Tuesdays – August 2012 | Simon Lindley (organ)

Simon Lindley features favourite Toccatas in a series of four free concerts in support of Doncaster Choral Society's Millennium Fund given by the choir's conductor. Dr Lindley says: "The choir's Millennium Fund is crucial to its being able on a regular basis each season to continue the presentation of quality concerts with distinguished soloists and a professional orchestra; the support given to last season's Toccata Tuesday events was tremendous - and came from choir members, former members, music lovers and supporters as well as very generous involvement by the staffs and their parishioners of the churches we visited. We look forward very much to this year's series".

The first concert visits Doncaster Minster in the year of the 150th anniversary of the magnificent five-manual Schulze organ, one of Europe's most significant instruments and one of very few five-manual instruments in Britain.

The music of the 2012 series begins at the Minster with William Mathias's Toccata giocosa of 1967, written for the opening of the (then) new organ at the Royal College of Organists; the first event concludes with a (rare) complete performance of Percy Whitlock's Plymouth Suite composed exactly 75 years ago; the last movement of the Suite is the "breeziest' of all organ toccatas by a British composer. Also included in the Minster programme is the greatly-loved Last Sleep of the Virgin, a favourite encore of the late Sir Thomas Beecham. This extract from Jules Massenet's La Vierge is being played in honour of the centenary of its composer's death in 1912.