Percy Whitlock: Toccata from the Plymouth Suite

Percy Whitlock: Toccata from the Plymouth Suite - Recorded at the Scarsdale Congregational Church, NY, November 16, 2021.

Percy William Whitlock (1 June 1903 – 1 May 1946) was born in Chatham, Kent. A student of Vaughan Williams at London's Royal College of Music, Whitlock quickly arrived at a musical idiom that combined elements of his teacher's output and that of Elgar. His lush harmonic style also bore traces of Gershwin and other popular composers of the 1920s. Stanford, Rachmaninov and Roger Quilter are other important stylistic influences. Like Vaughan Williams and Frederick Delius, he often used themes that sounded like folk songs but were, in fact, original creations.

From 1921 to 1930 Whitlock was assistant organist at Rochester Cathedral in Kent. He served as Director of Music at St Stephen's Church, Bournemouth for the next five years, combining this from 1932 with the role of that town's borough organist, in which capacity he regularly played at the local Pavilion Theatre. After 1935 he worked for the Pavilion Theatre full-time. A tireless railway enthusiast, he wrote at length and with skill about his interest. Sometimes, for both prose and music, he used the pseudonym Kenneth Lark. He worked closely with the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra, with which he gave dozens of live BBC broadcasts between 1933 and his death.

Whitlock's creative gifts expressed themselves most completely in the smaller forms, and as a miniaturist he can stand alongside many composers much better remembered than he. Among Whitlock's organ works are Five Short Pieces (1929), Four Extemporisations (1933), Seven Sketches on Verses of the Psalms (1934) and the Sonata in C minor (1936).

Whitlock was diagnosed with tuberculosis in his twenties, and also suffered from hypertension. Near the end of his life he lost his sight altogether, and he died in Bournemouth a few weeks before his 43rd birthday. For decades afterwards he remained largely forgotten. This neglect has eased in recent times, with the increased popularity of post-romantic organ literature.

The Plymouth Suite was the outcome of Whitlock and his wife Edna’s trip to Plymouth to attend a conference of 'The Incorporated Association of Organists'. There are five movements. Each of them is dedicated to an organist who had attended the conference.

The piece was composed between August and November of 1937. The last movement is a robust Toccata, dedicated to the Borough Organist of Plymouth, Dr. George Harry Moreton. Strangely, perhaps this is Whitlock's only essay in the form of Toccata. However this piece is in the tradition of the great French Toccatas of Böellmann, Gigout and Mulet. This is a grand finale to a fine suite. There are two themes at work. A wonderful, fairly slow moving pedal theme is set against a semi-quaver accompaniment on the manuals. The solo reed emerges to lift this piece into the heavens, using a wider melodic range and shorter note values.

The Plymouth Suite is well served in recordings and the Toccata is a regular concert pull.

(Sources: Wikipedia and Musicweb-international.com/Whitlock/)
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