Organ Classics at the London Oratory

Info & track listings

This recording could be aptly subtitled ‘Portrait of an Organ’, for one of its aims is to show the beauty and range of a rarely-recorded but historically important organ in one of London’s great churches.

Completed in 1954, it was the first modern British Church organ to draw in radical fashion on classical European influences and principles. Patrick Russill is one of the leading church musicians of his generation.

In 1977, at the age of 23, he succeeded Ralph Downes (on Downes’s nomination) as only the fourth Organist of the London Oratory since its foundation … He is also Head of Choral Direction and Church Music at the Royal Academy of Music, directing since 1987 the UK’s only conservatoire church music course.

In addition, he is noted for his work as Director of the mixed-sex London Oratory Junior Choir, as an editor, and as a writer and lecturer on church music matters.