This begins with something as archetypally English as over-cooked roast beef and Yorkshire pudding—the sound of a well-rounded Open Diapason strolling through a Larghetto movement by Boyce. This is exactly the sort of sound heard in thousands of English churches Sunday by Sunday. Indeed the impression after hearing each of these six historic instruments is just how little the ordinary English church organ has changed tonally in the last 300 years—the oldest instrument here, the Father Smith in Adlington Hall, dates from 1693.
Of course, what is needed to unlock the true glories of an instrument which has become so taken for granted in the musical life of this country is a player who fully appreciates its unique qualities. Jennifer Bate shows just such an innate understanding of the organ's potential. Coupled with her unfailingly sensitive perform- ances of music all-too-often dismissed as shallow and insubstantial (a description of almost laughable inaccuracy faced with Wesley's texturally and harmonically complex Voluntary in E flat) we have here some remarkable results which bear comparison with any organ recordings. My old organ teacher told me that virtually anybody could make a four manual organ, bristling with pistons and stops, sound impressive, but it takes real skill to produce something musically rewarding from a small instrument. How powerfully Jennifer Bate proves the point; the smallest instrument here, a 1764 Snetzler in the Dolmetsch Collection, possesses just five stops on one manual, yet in Voluntaries by Stanley and the little-known Henry Heron it speaks with as much character and integrity as an instrument 50 times its size.
With this disc Jennifer Bate and UnicornKanchana come to the end of their series tracing English organ music through the eighteenth century. The charm, vitality and elegance of the period is perfectly captured in these splendid recordings, any one of which (if not all six) ought to be in all organ enthusiasts' collections—if pressed I wouldsay that this sixth is my personal favourite. I have had some reservations over previous discs; these hold true here—after all the recordings were made at the same sessions—but nothing can diminish the invaluable work that has been done in exploring this important musical era; a task which Jennifer Bate has carried out magnificently.'