This article is taken from the July 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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I grew up in an American suburb where virtually all of our friends and acquaintances were people who had fled Iran following the catastrophe of 1979. To be an Iranian — whether adult or child — in the 1980s was to be perpetually on the defensive, and the older people I grew up around looked forever worried and tired and somehow quietly, even patiently, ill at ease in their new country. 

In a word, we were all traumatised. Whether out of genuine faith or from a need to give succour to their pain, a good many of them, my parents included, joined the Iranian congregation of a local Presbyterian church whose head pastor happened to have been a missionary in Iran and whose family spoke Persian. Our congregation met on Sunday afternoons in a minor chapel down the hall from the church library. 

The services were a mixture of lessons largely from the Old Testament meant to connect to the sensibilities of converts from Islam and exhortations about Christ’s loving mercy for a people who had seen and experienced more than they’d ever dare to speak of. 

What I struggled with, he made to sound maddeningly easy. “Golden fingers,” my teacher said

Our sympathetic American pastor noticed my boredom during the services and did me two favours that proved invaluable to my subsequent life. He handed me a copy of the Standard King James, which I read in the back of the chapel behind two fake potted plants as I waited for the service to end; the poetry of its severe imprecision was a boon to a child growing up with adults for whom English was a second language. Later on, as he found out that I was taking piano lessons, the pastor then assigned me to a sort of general piano accompaniment duty intended to give some sense of order to the haphazard hymn-singing.

Of the chapel’s piano which I am sure hadn’t been tuned since the days of John Calvin himself, the less said the better. But in an alcove behind the lectern was a wheezy electric organ with several of its stops malfunctioning, and for whatever reason it caught my attention. In the little bookcase behind the organist’s bench were stacks of organ music donated by a music-loving member of the English-speaking congregation and somehow relegated to our little chapel. 

A greatly stained set of the complete works of Buxtehude, the “great” E-minor Praeludium of Nicolaus Bruhns, scattered volumes from the old Straube and Germani editions of J.S. Bach, various bits of kitsch in organ arrangement — Sullivan’s Lost Chord, the minuet from Don Giovanni, and so on. Not knowing much else other than what I was learning in my piano lessons, I acquired a rudimentary command of the organ and devoured the music on that bookshelf, finding recordings of what I couldn’t play — which was most of it — in the listening room of the local library. 

As I went through the stages of adolescence with varying degrees of angst, I occasionally made attempts at being a more serious organist. In the midst of one of these pathetic episodes I was struggling through one of J.S. Bach’s organ transcriptions of a concerto from Vivaldi’s L’Estro Armonico. I think it was the great A-minor concerto BWV 593, and I was having trouble specifically with a dreadful spot in the third movement where, in the last concertino episode, Bach calls on both hands to alternate fast-moving chords in semiquavers (organists will know exactly which part I’m talking about). 

I had borrowed a recording of Simon Preston, whom I’d read about in a magazine for young musicians, playing it on the magnificent Marcussen organ of the Dom in Lübeck. What I struggled with, he made to sound maddeningly easy. “Golden fingers,” my teacher said. 

A few years later, those same golden fingers came to play a recital in Milan, where I was desultorily passing a year on a bursary to study, for one last time, organ with the titolario of the Basilica San Simpliciano. I have little recollection of Simon Preston’s recital except that he played magnificently and absolutely nailed Liszt’s endless Fantasy and Fugue on “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam”. 

My Milanese organ professor, one of those types who would get into physical altercations about the most insignificant minutiae of historical performance practice and whose lessons mostly focused on what not to do, was livid. “Musicista assurdo,” he spat after Preston’s monumental performance of the C-minor Passacaglia of J.S. Bach. “Those English know nothing of historical organs.” 

Uncertain as to whether my ears were lying to me in the wake of such a magnificent performance, I decided to terminate my lessons about a week or so later. I never liked practising in giant cold spaces anyhow, and a life spent with the clavicembalo was by then already calling out my name.

Perhaps five years later, my sole professional interaction with Simon Preston occurred in the first days of my professional life in Great Britain, in a little festival at a historic church in Richmond-upon-Thames whose artistic life has since been curtailed thanks to the anti-musical delusions of a new vicar. The first advice the plucky festival director gave me was: “Make sure you keep an eye on him and know where he is at all times.” Of these prescient words, more later. 

At the time I had my own delusions in becoming a conductor of sorts, at least from the harpsichord. The reader is advised that in early music, not being able to give either up- or downbeat is, alas, hardly a barrier to a career in conducting. It seems that my conducting gestures were indeed bad enough to have made this one of my first (and mercifully last) forays in professional arm-waving. 

Anyhow, I had been engaged by the festival to lead a band of young musicians which was to accompany the great man in the performance of two or three organ concertos by Handel. Of the rehearsals I remember practically nothing except that from the moment of his arrival, the august soloist disarmed us all with his kindness and encouragement. 

The festival manager’s advice — “keep an eye on him” — sadly came to have relevance on the night of the concert. With the band we performed one of the concertos from Handel’s op. 3 as an introduction to the grand entrance of our honoured soloist. As the final notes of the opening work were intoned, from the corner of my right eye I caught the festival director, who looked distinctly unhappy. 

Simon was nowhere to be found. Without going into more detail than necessary, it was the first I saw of a certain tragic forgetfulness that was later to intensify. Anyhow, for ten or so minutes I gave the audience my best attempt at improvised chat until they found him. “Holy jumping cats,” I thought — “Will he even know what to play?” 

This seems the sort of stuff that happens only in books, but I have rarely heard an audience so rapt in silence

As it turned out, my worries were completely unfounded, as Simon Preston not only proceeded to play the concertos beautifully but gave the most flawless performance I have ever heard of Mozart’s beastly F-minor Fantasia, during which he seemed, like the fabled medieval alchemists, to transmute the agreeable diapasons of a Georgian organ into a darkly snarling instrument worthy of the Hofburg itself. 

Looking back, I am sure this performance was itself a sonic marker of the sad darkness that was eventually to completely consume the organist in his final years. But it was this experience of the artist in the twilight of life that gave me a musical experience I shall never forget. 

A month or so after the concert, he and his wife Elizabeth invited me to a garden party at their home in Tunbridge Wells. For that, I shall be indescribably grateful, since in hindsight that afternoon proved to be one of the last meetings of this great generation. I can’t possibly recall everyone I saw there, but I do remember meeting Sir Stephen Cleobury and his wife Emma, James Bowman (whom I already knew), and a very frail-looking and clearly unwell Robert Tear, who died less than a year thereafter. 

In considering how I felt to be in this company — I, who only a few years before was stuck in a suburb of a mediocre American city, where I somehow managed to nourish myself with recordings of most of the people present that day — I am, for once, at a loss for words. I returned home late that evening and stayed up listened to a disc of Robert Tear singing Byrd with the Julian Bream Consort. 

Simon and Elizabeth later moved to Oxford. It was there that he spent his last years and where she looked after him with great solicitude and kindness. Occasionally I would see them at the local curry house or having an amble on the Banbury Road. Each time he seemed a bit more disoriented, a bit less in touch with the world outside. One afternoon, I took an incomparably tiresome visiting American organist to meet him. 

Poor Simon’s eyes glazed over as this fellow bloviated in Ohio Platt-Englisch about mixtures and wind pressures and trills with and without suffixes, but I knew that, at this point, Simon was in his own world and that if he was indeed annoyed, he was ever the consummate professional in not showing it. That afternoon was the last I saw of him in person. 

Likewise, I came to know and work with James Bowman in the last decade or so of his life. We met when I had been a fellow at New College in Oxford, where he was an old member and an enthusiastic supporter of the college’s famous choir. James used to come to college dinners now and then — a fact much appreciated by me as his sparkly banter did much to leaven the ham-fisted brinkmanship and varsity standard passive aggression that pass for discourse at an Oxbridge high table. 

At some point in our acquaintance, someone came up with the idea that James should give his final Wigmore Hall recital and that I should accompany him. Having decided that he had neither the stamina nor desire to sing an entire evening’s worth, with characteristic generosity James asked me to play two large solo sets in the programme (effectively about 80 per cent of the evening). Not that it mattered, of course, as the packed hall that May night in 2011 was made up of die-hard James Bowman acolytes of several decades’ standing. 

As he came out for the last set, a solo cantata by Handel, he whispered to me that, as his throat was dry, he would be needing a glass of water. This seems the sort of stuff that happens only in books, but I have rarely heard an audience so rapt in silence as he drank that water, nor an audience so wildly enthusiastic in its applause when he put his glass down. 

I have never myself received that sort of intense applause — for playing, that is. For all that he sang a total of some 20 minutes, it was absolutely and deservedly his night. Even the lithe and sensitive young men of my own age with dark eyes and long lashes who came backstage pushed right past me for him — an object lesson for life for the over-ambitious instrumentalist. After all, it all comes from the voice, doesn’t it? 

Usually when such gifted, era-defining figures pass into the next dimension the written response includes, if we’re lucky, one or two well-considered obituaries or reflections on the artist we have known. The rest devolves into various unmentionable strands, of which two stand out. 

One is what has now become basically long-form Twitter but which is still called music journalism. The other consists of contrived anecdotal reflections worthy of Barbara Walters (“I was horseback-riding with Saddam Hussein when he said …”) — how the dearly departed held the writer in sufficient confidence to impart one or two truly unique kernels of wisdom. Eulogies, like weddings, are always for other people. 

It may very well be that I ache to do the same, to beatifically contrive ultimately self-serving episodes wherein these two gave me the keys to unlocking a great artistic mystery. Though I have tried, I cannot find anything that would even remotely fit in within our current predilections for these sorts of easily digestible feelings that, by token of their very flimsiness, preclude further reflection. 

What I can say is that the work of these musicians is so immense that its legacy is measured in the way everyone after them performed and thought about music. Yes, even my angry Milanese maestro al organo, though he’d never have admitted it — after all, he and his fellow travellers reacted against Simon Preston or, more accurately, against what they thought he represented. Perhaps singers are a kinder tribe, for one knows few if any singers of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music — and certainly none who sing Oberon in Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream — who’d not acknowledge the influence of James Bowman. 

Neither was a musical archaeologist or a scholar-performer quoting from treatises to justify their musical decisions. Neither proclaimed aesthetic credos or hard and fast rules. Were one to ask me how these musicians — how their great generation, now all gone — changed my own approach to music I’d refer them not to ultimately empty words but rather to what they hear from those of us who have remained: si monumentum requiris, circumspice.