William Thomas Best
William Thomas Best's organ scores favour the grand recital manner: a Sonata in D minor, Concert Fantasia on a Welsh March, variations on national airs, wedding marches and transcriptions that turn the console into a one-player orchestra.
As corporation organist at St George's Hall, Liverpool for nearly forty years, he shaped the English concert-organ tradition that later town-hall programmes still draw on. His writing is practical and bold, built for instruments with full pedal boards and a wide palette of colour. Beside original works he arranged hundreds of excerpts from Handel, Bach and the orchestral repertoire, and published a thorough method, The Art of Organ Playing. Church settings such as the Service in F and a Benedicite with free organ part keep his name in liturgical use as well as on the recital platform.
Compositions by William Thomas Best appear on
Concert Organ Masterpieces
Masterpieces from the concert organ repertoire, played by Thomas Heywood on the restored Hill organ at St John’s Church, Toorak. The programme draws on his 1997 Grand Organ Concerts at the church.
Arranger
Just Married: Organ Music for a Wedding
A compilation of history's most celebrated organ music, long popular at weddings. The insert notes usefully group the tracks as processionals, recessionals and music for the signing of the register.
Centenary Plus
Sydney City Organist Robert Ampt plays the restored William Hill and Son Grand Organ at Sydney Town Hall in a programme spanning more than a century of music linked with the instrument, from Handel and Bach to Koehne, Dubois, Best and Ampt.
Melbourne Sounds Grand
Thomas Heywood’s first commercial recording presents the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Concert Organ in a grand-concert programme of virtuoso showpieces and transcriptions, chosen to display its orchestral colour, dynamics and power.