Mayfair Organ Concert: Richard Gowers

Today's Mayfair Organ Concert is given by Richard Gowers, Director of Music at St George's, Hanover Square, performing the following programme:

Janáček - Glagolitic Mass vii. Varhany sólo

Shostakovich - Passacaglia (1932)

Schönberg - Variations on a recitative Op. 40 (1941)

Copland - Episode (1941)

JS Bach - Passacaglia in C minor BWV 582

As ever admission is free with a retiring collection.

Richard Gowers is Director of Music at St George's Hanover Square and Principal Conductor of the London Handel Orchestra. The 2024-2025 season saw major soloist debuts at the Philharmonie (Berlin) with Berlin Philharmonic Brass,  which resulted in an immediate re-invitation for June 2026, the Golden Hall of the Musikverein (Vienna) in recital with trumpeter Matilda Lloyd, Suntory Hall (Tokyo), Lotte Concert Hall (Seoul) and Oriental Art Center (Shanghai) with the London Symphony Orchestra in Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony under Sir Antonio Pappano. 

In 2017-19 he held a scholarship to study Piano Accompaniment at the Royal Academy of Music and was awarded the Schubert Institute UK Prize at the 2019 Leeds Lieder Festival. He has appeared at Wigmore Hall, Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival and Oxford Song Festival, and with singers including Mary Bevan, Ashley Riches, Kieran Carrel and Helen Charlston. 

His critically-acclaimed recording of Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur was named a Gramophone ‘Editor’s Choice’, described in the magazine as “tremendously focused and intensely cerebral playing…[conveying] the fundamental musicality of the work”. He has frequently appeared live on BBC Radio 3, as well as on Radio 4, Classic FM, and BBC Television. 

Gowers was a chorister at King’s College, Cambridge, where he sang the famous ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ solo at the 2007 broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. He was organ scholar at King’s in 2014-17 and graduated from Cambridge with a starred first in Music. Based in London, he combines performing with teaching at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music. He was made an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music (ARAM) in 2024. 

Host or Publisher St George's Hanover Square