It was a great pleasure to be able to use the ‘New College’ consort organ (kindly loaned by its owner, John Mander) in a presentation I gave at Wadham College, Oxford, in April as part of the BIOS conference ‘The Global British Organ’. The organ is probably the one built for the college’s chorister school in 1663 by a member of the workshop of Robert Dallam, and was later rescued  from the college’s brewhouse by Sir John Sutton in the 1840s.

The work performed was Coprario’s Fantasia Suite 14, written for the court of Prince Charles at St James’s Palace in the early 1620s, but heard here with an organ part from Och. Mus. 1185 in the hand of Richard Goodson the younger, who was organist of New College when the organ was present there. We were thus able to reunite the music with the organ it was played on for probably the first time in some 300+ years!

With thanks to Melanie Plumley for the video, and Maurice Rogers (treble viol) and Marion Pilbeam (bass viol)

More video content featuring this instrument (one of the top five best-preserved organs of its type) will be appearing on the website in due course.