Judith Bingham - Heaven and Earth

Judith BINGHAM (b.1952)

Heaven and Earth 

Heaven and Earth

Vanished London Churches

Bright Spirit

Kalmar Rising

Daphne's Room

Roman Conversions

Mountain Music

Missa Brevis V 'Behold the Sea', Movement: Voluntary Eternal Procession

Tom Winpenny (Organ)

A decade has elapsed since Naxos issued the first CD of Tom Winpenny performing organ music by Judith Bingham. In the intervening years a two-disc set from Stephen Farr (Resonus, 8/17) has been released, but all the music on this release is appearing on disc for the first time.

The recording location of Sweden’s Västerås Cathedral is significant. In 2013 Bingham was commissioned to write a work for the cathedral, which has been followed by a string of further works for both the two cathedral organs and its choir. The most recent commission dates from 2019 and finds Winpenny on the main four-manual instrument, partnered by the cathedral’s director of music, Johan Hammarström, playing the slightly smaller (three-manual) choir organ. Eternal Procession recalls the time of the 15th-century Scandinavian union, known as the Kalmar, through a buoyant and windswept depiction of vessels returning safely to harbour.

A 2018 commission for the cathedral’s two organs gives this album its title. Heaven and Earth includes references to the natural world – notably birdsong and evocations of new life in springtime – but was inspired by a painting of Ophelia by Millais, while the title is drawn from the famous lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio’).

History, as conveyed through both writings and paintings, is clearly a significant source of inspiration for Bingham’s organ music. The First Kalmar, through a haunting musical language, seems to be peering back through the mists of time. The solemn tread of the organ is accompanied by a tolling bell rung, on this recording, by Hammarström himself. The enticingly titled Vanished London Churches of 2019 owes its impetus to a painting by the 19th-century painter George Scharf. An eeriness and otherworldliness creeps over much of the music, as if ghostly figures still inhabit the seven long-forgotten buildings. All this is highly effectively conveyed by Winpenny, who does so by means of some exquisite registrations.

Bingham’s musical language, as revealed in this selection of recent organ works, draws on a whole range of different devices, all focused towards evoking almost spectral images. She has a highly original sense of how the organ can conjure up haunting, almost ghostly sounds, all of which are powerfully conveyed in Winpenny’s compelling performances.

Gramophone Review