Elgar: Complete Organ Works

Hereford Cathedral’s mighty Willis organ, built just three years before Elgar composed his Organ Sonata in G Major in 1895, leaps to life under Tom Winpenny’s command. He puts the recently restored instrument through its paces with great feeling for the drama of the composer’s four-movement sonata. Winpenny underlines the thematic invention of Elgar’s showpiece with captivating combinations of tone colors and timbres, strikingly so in his fleet-footed delivery of the work’s dreamlike second movement and its utterly sublime “Andante espressivo.” His spirited tempos impart momentum to the noble progress of pieces such as Loughborough Memorial Chime, originally written for the inauguration of the carillon at Loughborough War Memorial in 1923, and assured organ arrangements of Elgar’s brass band classic The Severn Suite and “Nimrod” from the Enigma Variations.