BIOS Reporter – Volume 19, No.4 – October 1995

Organologists have a tendency to confine themselves to the instrument, its makers and its repertoire, and only rarely do they focus their attention on organists themselves. Generally speaking, organists of former times do not seem to be of much organological interest unless they played a part either in designing particular instruments or in the evolution of the instrument generally: one thinks of figures such as S.S. Wesley, Henry Smart, and W.T. Best, and in our own times of Ralph Downes. Straddling both centuries is Walter Parratt (1841-1924), who – although undoubtedly one of the leading performers of his generation – has received no extended treatment (as far as we know) since the hagiography that is D.F. Tovey and Geoffrey Parratt’s Walter Parratt (London, Oxford University Press, 1941)…