Alan Harverson

Alan Harverson (Alan Hooper) (16 August 1922 – 31 January 2006) was an English organist, pianist and teacher, born and raised in southern Ireland.

He won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in 1939, taking six prizes for piano and organ playing and the coveted Certificate of Merit. He was eventually elected to a professorship in 1973 after having taught there since 1942. He was an organist at number of London churches in succession, including St Mary's Bryanston Square and the London Oratory. He was appointed to the influential churches of St Gabriels, Cricklewood and the Servite Priory, Fulham, where he presided over a new instrument by Grant, Degens & Bradbeer. It is typical of him that, having been appointed, he refused to take up the position in Fulham until the new organ had been completed. Latterly, he was one of the organists at Holy Trinity Sloane Street, where his colourfully expansive playing could be heard in central London each week in the years after 1987.

He found a permanent niche as organist to the BBC Symphony Orchestra and consequently played the organ for twenty-nine Last Nights of the Proms. Alan Harverson worked with many of the leading orchestras and conductors of his time and was a valued chamber musician.

His organ recital work took him all over Europe and he honed his interpretation of the leading Baroque composers in the Netherlands in a series of visits as a young man to conduct his own original research into the styles of organ building represented by surviving instruments dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and so he can be seen as one of the pioneers of the revival of Baroque performance practice in modern English organ playing.

Guardian Obituary:

Nick Hartley

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/mar/14/obituaries.readersobituaries

My uncle, Alan Harverson, who has died aged 83, had a successful career as a church and concert organist, continuo player, accompanist, organ designer and teacher. He gave recitals throughout the UK and northern Europe, appearing in the Royal Festival Hall Bach series in the 1960s and 70s. Although primarily a baroque specialist, he introduced audiences to unfamiliar music and gave first performances of works by John Lambert, Humphrey Searle and Peter Fricker – the more way out the better.

He was effectively resident organist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and notched up 29 Last Nights of the Proms; he gave chamber music concerts with the oboist Janet Craxton, the tenor Peter Pears and many others. As a schoolboy, I remember his name coming up regularly on the Third Programme. Memorable performances included the Bach B minor Mass under Klemperer, Handel's Messiah under Malcolm Sargent and the Mozart Requiem under Colin Davis, the last still available on CD.

Alan was the youngest of four children brought up in a Quaker family in Ireland. According to my mother, he was up on the piano stool as soon as he could walk; later, he would drive people mad playing God Save the King in all 12 keys (perhaps not the wisest tune to play in the Irish Free State.) He won a scholarship to the Royal Academy during the second world war, winning prizes for solo piano, piano accompaniment, organ and improvising.

He had wide cultural interests: art, theatre, literature, cookery and travel. With his partner Michael Thorogood, an artist and composer, he explored the cathedral cities of Europe. At Easter, they would often visit Granada or Seville for the Holy Week processions.

Telegraph Obituary

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1511305/Alan-Harverson.html

Alan Harverson, who died on 31 January aged 83, was the organist at the Last Night of the Proms on 29 occasions from the 1940s to the 1970s and was known to television viewers and concert-goers for the shining bald dome atop his stocky build.

The organist at this annual patriotic jamboree is rarely credited, and even more rarely identified by his face. However, with the conductor, he plays a pivotal role in holding together the assembled forces of orchestra, choir and audience in favourites such as Rule Britannia, Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 and Jerusalem.

For Harverson, who took all the emotion and excitement in his stride, it was one of a wide range of jobs that included church organist, soloist, instrument designer, recording artist and funeral accompanist.

The youngest of four children, Alan Harverson Hooper was born to an English Quaker family in Co Carlow, south of Dublin, on 16 August 1922. His father ran one of Ireland's first electric power stations, keeping the lights glowing during a turbulent period in the country's history.

Young Alan was something of a child prodigy. As a toddler he would clamber on to the piano stool to improvise tunes he had picked up. Given the political circumstances, his rendition of God Save the King in all 12 keys had to be abruptly silenced on more than one occasion.

He attended a local Methodist school and from there went to a Quaker boarding school at Newtown, near Cork, winning a scholarship in 1940 to the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied with Henry Wood and GD Cunningham.

Soon he was established as a popular freelance musician. He played with the BBC Symphony, London Symphony and English Chamber Orchestras, working with conductors such as Colin Davis and Malcolm Sargent. For many years he was organist at St Gabriel's Church, Cricklewood. Sargent was a great admirer, on one occasion presenting Harverson with a medallion inscribed "To my favourite organist". In February 1967 Harverson gave the first broadcast performance of Peter Fricker's Ricercare for Organ.

When the organ at the Royal Festival Hall was first built, Harverson assisted the acoustic engineers by playing snatches of Bach. Pulling his stops was Brian Sewell. Harverson was also engaged from time to time as a consultant-designer, and, among other projects, was involved in drawing up the specification for the new organ at the Servite Priory in Fulham Road, Chelsea, in 1969. This was the first organ in Britain to combine all-mechanical key action with electric stop action and adjustable setter pistons.

He undertook the less glamorous bread-and-butter work with just as much enthusiasm – including over the years playing for hundreds of funerals at St Marylebone Crematorium, where his own funeral took place on 17 February.

Harverson's specialism was Bach. He was as much at home on a magnificent, large organ as on an intricate baroque instrument. His recording of Bach organ music from 1962 has been a perennial best-seller; so too has the 1966 recording of the Mozart Requiem conducted by Colin Davis, in which Harverson played a key role. In 1972 he contributed to Spare Time for Music, a BBC book with works for amateur musicians to play.

At his home, which he shared for many years with his partner Michael Thorogood, Harverson created dozens of highly surreal collages, many of them sexual in nature, using an extensive collection of pictures cropped from Sunday newspaper supplements and other magazines.

Despite being born a Quaker, Harverson was in adult life baptised into the Church of England. Asked recently about his faith, he denied having any belief. However, he and Thorogood (who predeceased him a year ago) made a point of enjoying the highly ritualised religious ceremonies that take place each year in Seville and Granada during Holy Week.