Simon Preston, who has died aged 83, was organist and master of the choristers at Westminster Abbey from 1981 to 1987 and previously organist at Christ Church, Oxford. At both institutions he set unprecedented standards of excellence. He later abandoned the sheltered world of English cathedral music to spread his wings in North America, Australasia and venues all over Europe.
His formidable talents at the keyboard, combined with a wealth of experience as a choral conductor, as well as energy and charisma in abundance, ensured that he was in demand for many decades from his early days as an organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge. In addition to his prolific live concerts all over the world, he amassed a discography amounting to more than 100 recordings as recitalist, concerto soloist and choral director.
He first came to attention in 1958 when, as organ scholar under David Willcocks, he accompanied that year’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s. His first solo recording was made for Argo a couple of years later, featuring music by Franck and Messiaen; the fact that he had only a week’s notice to prepare the latter’s taxing L’Ascension has passed into legend.
He made his debut at the Royal Festival Hall in 1962 playing the organ solos in Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, and was to give nine recitals there between 1965 and 1989. Also in 1962 he made his first appearance at the BBC Proms, as soloist in Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony. He was to feature in 21 Proms concerts between that year and 2009.
By 1966 he had a reputation as one of the young generation’s superstars of the console. The expectations for his appearance at a Royal Albert Hall concert that year in aid of the Royal College of Organists centenary appeal were high and his insouciant dispatch of Bossi’s Etude symphonique, with its exorbitantly virtuoso pedal part, brought the house down.
It was shortly after his London debut that he had been appointed sub-organist at Westminster Abbey, where he remained from 1962 to 1967. After a short gap, during which he spent a year in charge of music at St Albans Abbey in the absence of Peter Hurford, he moved to Christ Church, Oxford, where he was organist (as well as lecturer and tutor at the university) from 1970 to 1981, returning in the latter year to Westminster Abbey as organist and master of the choristers.
At Christ Church he was rightly proud of the “bright and vigorous” sound of the trebles he developed both for services and in acclaimed recordings of music by Lassus, Byrd, Haydn, Handel and Vivaldi, among others. He had particular affection for a disc devoted to William Walton.
The architecture of Westminster Abbey demanded a slightly different approach. There, he once noted, the choristers needed “to make a tremendous amount of sound and had to sing very powerfully because of the building – it’s very high and absorbs much of the sound”. Christ Church, by contrast, being less lofty, did not require such volume.
At Westminster his known volatility and impatience to raise standards and broaden repertoire caused bemusement, if not outright antipathy, in some quarters. Recordings made there included well received ones of music by Handel, Palestrina and Allegri. He directed the music at the 1986 wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, also in that period composing much of the music attributed to Salieri in the 1984 film Amadeus.
By 1987 his dissatisfaction with the status quo had reached crisis point and he left the world of English cathedral music for good, now able to devote even more energy to solo work and to a lesser extent conducting.
In 1990 he became the founding artistic director of the Calgary Organ festival in the Canadian province of Alberta, from which a number of prizewinners (including Kevin Bowyer, winner of the first competition) have gone on to make distinguished careers.
He made three recordings of the Poulenc Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani (with André Previn, Seiji Ozawa and Nicholas Braithwaite), two of the Handel organ concertos (with Yehudi Menuhin and Trevor Pinnock), and recordings of many other works including Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony (with the Berlin Philharmonic under James Levine), and the Copland Symphony for Organ and Orchestra with the St Louis Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin.
Born in Bournemouth, the son of John Preston, an architectural draughtsman, and Doreen (nee Lane), he entered King’s College Choir as a treble under Boris Ord. Having begged to be able to learn the organ, he had lessons there with Hugh McLean.
After moving to Canford school, where he studied with Anthony Brown, he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied the organ with CH Trevor. From there he returned to King’s College as organ scholar under Willcocks. Impressed and somewhat intimidated by Willcocks’s meticulousness, he records that he “spent five to six hours every day practising to ensure that I met the required standards”.
A similar fastidious attention to detail marked his own later music-making. His complete traversal of Bach’s organ works, made for Deutsche Grammophon between 1987 and 2000, is, however, characterised as much by its exhilarating flair as its technical proficiency.
Articulation is needle-sharp, phrasing imaginatively sculpted, tempi often breathtaking. While the “Dorian” Prelude and Fugue in D minor, BWV 538, is played on a Baroque-style plenum (chorus of principal stops) throughout, facilitating an ideal balance between grandeur and momentum, the “St Anne” Prelude and Fugue in E flat, BWV 552, is both registered and played more unconventionally, the prelude, with its sparkling mixtures and jaunty rhythms, projected as animated rather than magisterial, the fugue building from a quiet opening to a climactic conclusion with irresistible verve.
He was appointed OBE in 2000 and CBE in 2009.
He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Hays, whom he married in 2012.
• Simon John Preston, organist and conductor, born 4 August 1938; died 13 May 2022
