Organ Recitals

Thomas Allery

In addition to his duties running the music programme at Temple Church, Thomas Allery maintains an active career as a keyboard player, in demand both as a soloist and continuo player, and equally at home on and harpsichord. Recent concert engagements have taken him to festivals at Buxton, St Albans International Organ Festival, Paxton, Orkney, Cadogan Hall, Lichfield Festival, and The Grange opera. In 2024 he was sponsored by the Eric Thompson to make a film of historic music from the City of London entitled ‘Sounds of the Square Mile’.

Thomas is in regular demand as a continuo player on organ and harpsichord, regularly performing with the Sixteen and with the award-winning chamber ensemble, Ensemble Hesperi. With this group, he has performed, broadcast and recorded widely. This ensemble has a reputation for its imaginative programming and its specialism in Scottish baroque repertoire. With Hesperi, Thomas was a ‘Live Music Now’ artist, delivering regular workshops in care homes, day centres and SEND schools across the UK, including projects leading choral residency programmes in care homes. In 2014-15, Thomas was a Junior Fellow in Harpsichord and Continuo at the Royal College of Music, and in 2019, he was selected as a Britten-Pears young artist, performing Bach cantatas under the direction of Philippe Herreweghe at Snape Maltings.

Today, Thomas is an advocate for the performance of figured bass and is passionate about its use as a pedagogical tool for music students. He is currently undertaking research into how seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continuo treatises can be adapted for use in keyboard education today and presented on this at the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini’s Conference on Basso continuo in 2021. Thomas currently is a professor of basso continuo in the Historical Performance department at the Royal College of Music.

Having initially studied Music at the University of Oxford, he subsequently graduated with distinction from the Masters programme at the Royal College of Music before being awarded a scholarship to study for an Artist Diploma at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he studied with Carole Cerasi and James Johnstone. In 2016 he was supported by the Eric Thompson trust to study historic organ repertoire with Erwin Wiersinga at the Martinikirk in Groningen.

Charles Andrews is Organist of the Temple Church and professor of organ and Organ co-ordinator at the Royal College of Music, continuing a long-standing connection between the two institutions. Charles studied at the RCM with David Graham, Sophie-Véronique Cauchefer-Choplin, John Barstow and John Blakely with the aid of a Douglas & Kyra Downie Award, achieving the Harold Darke Memorial Prize for organ.

Before joining the Temple Church, Charles was Associate Director of Music at All Saints, Margaret Street, one of London’s most prestigious music departments, from 2011-16. Recently, four live performances with Temple Church Choir have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, including the first performance of Carmina tempore viri by Kenneth Hesketh (nominated for an Ivor Novello Award) in 2021. Engagements for 2026 include a recital at St Bavo, Haarlem in the Orgelstad concert series. A solo recital of British music, recorded at the Temple Church, was released in October 2025 and is available from the Temple Church shop or here, https://orcd.co/templeorgan100

Charles’s playing can be heard at several weekly services and concerts at the Temple Church, continuing the virtuoso tradition of such predecessors as George Thalben-Ball and John Birch.

 

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