Let the Pealing Organ Blow!

RECORDINGS


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The Christchurch
Town Hall organ
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"Let the Pealing Organ Blow!"

Once more available!!

Full tracklist: here
See the making of this historic CD here

Welcome to the website of the Rieger

in the Christchurch Town Hall,
New Zealand

REVIEWS
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Reviewed by Basil Ramsey on the

Music and Vision Daily website

"Christchurch in New Zealand has an excellent 1997 Rieger organ in its Town Hall, and an organist with a technique to match. Most importantly, the two make good music together. Furthermore, a situation like this requires a musical balance, Bach one moment and Sousa the next."

-- MORE from the review

Music Web UK

Reviewed by Dr Simon Jenner

"The Carlo Curley of Christchurch? Almost. Blackpool-born Martin Setchell studied Modern Languages at Exeter, then organ with Reginald Dixon, Peter Hurford, Pierre Cochereau, and Marie-Claire Alain. He won many prizes. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1974 with his appointment to the University of Canterbury School of Music, where he is now senior lecturer. He records regularly for the New Zealand Concert FM programme. Thus far impeccable credentials. Perhaps this CD is a spin-off from his concert FM broadcasts.

He plays a popular programme beautifully, and the Rieger organ, recorded close, makes an impressive, clean, but warm sound. The Widor is marginally less fast but registered more immediately than the acclaimed Lindley performance in Leeds Parish Church which is more distant. This is a full-blooded reading that allows, in its close registration, a wonderfully sotto voce effect from the pipes
to drift just above audibility. The Bach items are by a pupil of Peter Hurford. The organ doesn't allow a period-aware performance of the silvery effect we sometimes hear on many baroque organs, but this intelligently selected Bach..... " READ MORE at the website

Press, December 19, 1997
by David Sell for the Christchurch

"The thousands who have turned up to hear the two series of lunchtime concerts since the long-waited-for debut of Christchurch's Town Hall organ in May will recognise this as the ideal souvenir and Christmas present. It is an unashamed demonstration of what this versatile instrument can do.

Starting with the ubiquitous Widor Toccata, Martin Setchell takes the listener through 15 items, from Bach to Joplin. He plays it as a cinema organ in an arrangement of Meyerbeer's Coronation March, as a recital organ in Franck's Choral No. 3 in A minor, and as a fun instrument in Alfred Louis James Lefebure-Wely's Sortie in E flat. Martin Setchell's playing is technically meticulous and with an impressive sense of stylistic differences. Registrations cover the whole scope of the organ's specification, and are clear and tasteful.

Recording quality is excellent. The 32-foot Kontraposaune at the end of the Cesar Franck is as powerful and distortion-free in the recording as in the auditorium. The attractively illustrated CD booklet is informative for the casual listener as well as the serious organ buff, and contains a historical description of the first major pipe organ to have been built in New Zealand for some decades."