Evening Organ Recital with Adrian Partington

Join us for an Evening Organ Recital with our Director of Music, Adrian Partington! Glorious music in beautiful surroundings - what better way to spend an evening?

The programme will be as follows:

Prelude and Fugue “The Wedge”                                               J.S.Bach              14’

Two Chorale Preludes                                                                   C.H.H.Parry

i)                   “Martyrdom”                                                                                             3’30

ii)                  “Croft’s 136th”                                                                                           3’30

A Fantasy                                                                                       Harold Darke       6’

Prelude and Fugue in C major                                        Camille Saint-Saëns       9’

In a monastery garden                                                             Albert Ketelby        5’

The ride of the Valkyries                       Richard Wagner (arr. E.H.Lemare )        5’

Parade of the sunbeams                                                     Quentin McLean         4’

Total                                                                                                                            50’

Admission is free with a retiring collection in aid of Cathedral music, but we ask that you register your attendance in advance by clicking on the 'Book Now' button to the right of this page.

Information about our upcoming organ recitals can be found by clicking on the button below:

About Adrian Partington:

Adrian has been Director of Music at Gloucester since January 2008. During his years here, he has introduced Girl Choristers to the Cathedral Choir, has taken the choir to sing in the U.S.A., Canada, South Africa and Sweden, and has made several CDs, most recently the Church Music of Ian King, in June 2021. In May 2019, he took the Choristers to sing with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Philharmonie in Berlin.

Adrian has been Conductor of the BBC National Chorus of Wales since 1999. Since then, he has prepared that chorus for well over a hundred broadcast concerts (including, pre Covid, two BBC Proms each year), many of which he has conducted himself. The chorus has made many cds, two of which have been nominated for Grammy awards. The chorus’s most recent cd - which Adrian conducted - is of Stanford’s previously un-performed orchestral mass Via victrix 1918. He is to direct for a cd more un-recorded music by Stanford in 2022: the Elegiac Ode and the Latin Te Deum.

He has directed four Gloucester Three Choirs Festivals, in which he has conducted the Philharmonia in many of the great choral-orchestral classics, including Mahler’s Eighth and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphonies, Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, and the great oratorios of Elgar. He has also conducted many instrumental symphonies and concertos, and much contemporary orchestral music by such important composers as John Adams, Colin Matthews, and Joseph Phibbs.

Adrian enjoys an active career as a guest conductor of orchestras. In recent years he has conducted the Philharmonia at the Festival Hall, several times at St.John’s Smith Square, and in various provincial cities. He has conducted the RPO in many venues over the years,and will direct that orchestra in a series of concerts in the Midlands and the North in 2022. Every year he conducts the BBC NOW- most recently in a programme of Respighi and Piazzolla - and has conducted the Royal Northern Sinfonia, the BSO, the Orchestra of WNO and the Royal Flanders Philharmonic.

Adrian was educated at King’s College Cambridge, where he was the Organ Scholar. He continues to be in demand as an organist- recent engagements include a Concerto with the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra in 2019, and recitals in Japan in November 2018.He was a soloist at one of the televised BBC Promenade concerts in 2018.