Five... of London's Historical Musical Instruments, in Action

Baroque-era double basses, mighty cinema organs and more

Image by Handel Hendrix House.

Hi and welcome to a musical interlude in this weekend’s email.

Inspired by the release of a great new project from Handel Hendrix House (more about that below): a handful of videos I’ve been enjoying of amazing musical performances. They’re being played on restored church organs, Baroque double basses and more ye olde musical instruments - still operational, some of them ones you can actually play yourself - scattered all over the city.

Category is: historical musical instruments around London

A little (Baroque) night music: The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment perform all over the place in London - grand concert halls, old churches and regularly, Southbank Centre, where they’re Resident Orchestra. But for me their series of informal chamber music gigs Night Shift is the most magical: music written for intimate spaces, performed in small pubs. (Heads up that there’s one coming up on 13 Feb.)

The OAE play on instruments - or sometimes faithful replicas of instruments - from the era the music was written, to bring you closer to the the way it might have sounded then. In practice that means you can be sitting in a cheerfully crowded east London pub, ordering in pizza and listening to one of the city’s leading orchestras, a metre or two away from a three-century old double bass. This video’s from my favourite of their regularly rotating venues, Stepney Green’s The George Tavern.

A mighty piece of cinema history: The Musical Museum in Brentford’s crammed with historic musical instruments, many of them still operational - but the most impressive piece in their collection might be their 1929 Mighty Wurlitzer Cinema Organ, developed to accompany silent films, creating some of the pageantry of a much bigger orchestra and playable by just one person. It’s one of only two that we know of still operational in London, the other at the Troxy in Limehouse. 

If you’re in the market for a very thorough runthrough of how the cinema organ works, you’re also in luck. But for just sitting back and enjoying the pomp and grandeur of the Wurlitzer in action, this video of Donald MacKenzie at the helm is great, the organ rising from the ground like a neon phoenix. 

As an aside, the museum’s currently crowdfunding to stay open, if you want to help them raise the around £60,000 they need to avoid closure.