Alfonso Vega Nunez was the organist of the Cathedral of Morelia, Michoacán, México for 60 years and also the initiator, director and promoter of the International Organ Festival in the city of Morelia, which now bears his name : “Alfonso Festival Nuñez Vega “.

Virtuoso musician and man of culture, Don Alfonso was born in Puruandiro, Michigan September 17, 1924. At 12, he joined the School of Children of the Cathedral and the Sacred Music School of Morelia, where he made a brilliant career under the direction of renowned masters Miguel Bernal Jiménez and Ignacio Mier Arriaga. In 1940, he obtained a degree in Gregorian chant and the title of master of musical composition. In 1946, the body Baccalaureate.

Since 1943, he was appointed organist of the Cathedral Moreliana. From 1946 to 1963 he taught piano and organ. At the School of Folk Fine Arts, he was a piano teacher since 1948, and Harmony and History of Music.

At the same time, he developed significant teaching and promotion of sacred music ; he leads a concert activity in major forums in Europe (Vienna, Madrid, Paris and Germany), and Latin America. He wrote many works for organ, certain liturgical : Mass for choir and organ, motets, sacred songs, etc. He has recorded albums under international labels like Peerless Luzam and Cook.

Jean-François Vaucher started to play the piano at a very young age with François Riat and continued with the celebrated swedish pianist Inger Wikström.

At fifteen he started to study the organ with François Demierre, the friend and condisciple of André Marchai, and continued his studies with Pierre Segond at the Geneva Conservatory where he obtained a first prize for virtuosity in 1975.

In the saine year he was appointed principal organist at the church of Saint-François in Lausanne, and since then, he has continued his carreer as soloist, throughout Europe.

Since then, he has been regularly invited as professer at the sommer academy of Saint-Dié in France where he shares the task of teaching with important world personalities such as Luigi Tagliavini, Xavier Darasse, Bernard Lagacé, Louis Thiry, and he is regularly invited to be member of juries for international competitions.

Since 1985, he shares his carreer as soloist with that of professer- at the Lausanne Conservatory. His repertory, which extends from ancient to contemporary music, has often been recorded by the radio and on record.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Vaucher

Montserrat Torrent began taking piano lessons with her mother, who had studied under Enrique Granados, Catalan pianist and composer of classical music. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Montserrat entered the Municipal School of Music in Barcelona. Once she had completed her piano studies she realised her favourite musical instrument was the organ. She later took lessons with Noëli Pierront in Paris. Upon returning to Barcelona she began to work on the restoration of antique organs together with master organ builder Gabriel Blancafort.

She began teaching in 1956 when she was offered a post as an organ lecturer at the Higher Municipal Conservatory of Barcelona. In 1991 she was made professor emeritus. The majority of organ professors and lecturers in Spain have taken lessons from her.

Montserrat Torrent has performed all over the world, both as a soloist and with large orchestras. In the course of her professional trajectory she has received several honours and awards, including the Grand Prix du Disque from the Charles Cros Academy in Paris (1965), the Honorary Medal from the Royal Conservatory of Madrid and the National Music Award from the Catalan Government.

The awards ceremony took place on 27 May at 12pm at the conference hall (Sala d’actes) of the Rectorate building, and included speeches by Torrent’s sponsors, professors Cèsar Calmell and Joan Casals of the Department of Musical Education, Plastic and Body Expression Teaching. In her acceptance speech, Torrent fondly recalled those who had taught her and stated that “for me, music is like a stream of pure water that absorbs us and melts us with its force”.

The ceremony ended with the interpretation of Gaudeamus Igitur by the UAB Choir and a few words by UAB Rector Lluís Ferrer, who declared that the University was honoured to present its most prestigious academic award to someone who had strived to preserve the country’s cultural heritage by recovering and restoring several organs destroyed during the Civil War, as well as being a teacher and guide to so many organ players in Catalonia and all of Spain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montserrat_Torrent

Sir George Thomas Thalben-Ball CBE (18 June 1896 – 18 January 1987) was an organist and composer who, though originally from Australia, spent most of his life in Britain. Born in Sydney, of Cornish parents who brought him back to the UK when he was four years old, he was known as George Thomas Ball or G.T. Ball until early adulthood (“Thalben” was his mother’s maiden name). He studied organ and piano at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London, which he entered at the unusually young age of 14. The level of his talent can be gleaned from the fact that he played the solo part in the first performance by an English-trained pianist of Rachmaninoff’s famously difficult Piano Concerto No. 3. This event occurred in 1915 at the RCM, when he was aged 19.

After graduating from the RCM, the young man was asked to deputise as organist at London’s Temple Church by its then organist, Sir Henry Walford Davies. In 1923, he succeeded Walford Davies as organist and director of the Temple Church choir, a post he held for nearly 60 years. Under his direction, the choir achieved in 1927 international fame with its recording of Mendelssohn’s Hear My Prayer, featuring Ernest Lough as the treble soloist. This recording was followed by a number of others on the HMV label.

Thalben-Ball composed several anthems and organ works, of which the best known is his meditative Elegy for organ, which was played, for example, at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. This piece originated in an improvisation which Thalben-Ball played at the end of a live BBC daily religious service during World War II, when the service finished a couple of minutes earlier than expected. So many listeners to the broadcast telephoned the BBC to ask what the composition was, that he decided to write down his improvisation as well as he could remember it. He compiled, in addition, a complete set of chants for the psalms, most of them being his own work; this set was published as The Choral Psalter.

In 1935 he was awarded the Lambeth degree of Doctor of Music. From that time until his knighthood, he was generally known by his colleagues (as Walford Davies had been known before him) simply as “Doctor”.

A regular radio broadcaster, Thalben-Ball also carried out extremely numerous performances in many concert venues, not only in Britain; he gave the inaugural recitals on the organs of the Royal Albert Hall (where he had the post of curator organist) and the BBC Concert Hall. In 1949, he was appointed Birmingham City Organist and Birmingham University Organist, a post he held for three decades. During this tenure, he gave over 1,000 weekly recitals. He wrote in 1972 an organ solo called ‘Toccata Beorma’ as a celebration of his links with the city. In 1948, Thalben-Ball was elected President of the Royal College of Organists. He had become a Fellow of this institution in 1915 (at the age of 18). For many years he taught at the Royal College of Music, where his students included Meredith Davies, later to find fame as a conductor.

Thalben-Ball was throughout his life an unashamed virtuoso, whether as pianist, as organist, or as choirmaster. His style of performance (like that of his younger contemporary Virgil Fox in the USA) was rooted in the 19th century, and made full use of every facility of the modern organ. Even when he was playing baroque repertoire, there would be many registration changes, ample swell pedal and dramatic contrasts in volume. He could sight-read, transpose and improvise in any style and at any length to the highest standard without perceptible effort. Long after many organists had taken up the habit of hiring a deputy for choir-training purposes, he retained full control of his choir, without any assistant organist or voice coach.

He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1967 and knighted in 1982. The latter honour was conferred shortly after his retirement from Temple Church. He was twice married and had a son and daughter. His second wife was Jennifer Bate, the concert organist.

http://www.boychoirs.org/choirmasters/historic/hdir003.html

Born in 1987, Martin Tembremande start playing organ in Orléans then in Bordeaux where he won the first prize in the conservatory of that city. In the year 2006, he was admitted in the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris where he practised organ with Michel Bouvard and Olivier Latry.

Prizewinner of Granville Organ Competition, he also won the first prize at the Concours Pierre de Manchicourt in the city Béthune (north of France).

He plays a lot of concerts with the choir of Radio-France, the Bordeaux National Symphonie Orchestra and organ recitals on historical and contemporary organs in France.

In 2009 he won the first prize in organ at Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris.

Martin TEMBREMANDE – Chartres 2009

Yoann Tardivel is a concert organist and professor of organ at the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional de Toulouse.

Trained in Paris, Copenhagen and Brussels, his main teachers were Michel Bouvard, François Henri Houbart and Olivier Latry.It is with Bine K. Bryndorf that he deepens the Nordic repertoire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and completes his itinerary with Bernard Foccroulle whom he will be the assistant at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels from 2010 to 2016.

His passion for the music of Olivier Messiaen led him to participate in 2008 in the International Competition of Toulouse with a program built around the “Livre d’orgue” and he won the 1st Prize. On this occasion he was elected “E.C.H.O. young organist of the year” for 2009.

As a soloist, he has already performed in some of the most representative places of the French organ and is also invited to international festivals in Europe. His recordings of works by Jehan Alain, César Franck and Camille Saint-Saëns (Éditions Hortus) have been unanimously acclaimed by the critics.
With the ensemble InAlto, he recorded “E vidi quattro stelle” by Bernard Foccroulle, on texts by Dante (Fuga Libera).

Music of the 20th and 21st centuries has a special place in his repertoire, and he regularly performs in festivals devoted to the music of today such as Klangspuren in Innsbruck (Austria), Ars Musica in Brussels (Belgium) or the Fabrique de l’orgue at Radio France, collaborating with composers such as Gilbert Amy, Pascal Dusapin, Bernard Foccroulle, Benoit Mernier, Yves Chauris, Vincent Paulet, Valery Aubertin, Thomas Lacôte or even Dai Fujikura who composed for him Water Path, created in 2016.

Producer and host on Musiq3-RTBF for 10 years, Yoann Tardivel has created, produced and hosted the program “Écoutez et plus si affinités”, a weekly program of initiation and discovery of the great repertoire but also of less known works.

He taught until 2021 at ARTS², the Mons School of the Arts (Belgium), an establishment that combines music, speech and visual arts.

Yohann TARDIVEL-ERCHOFF – Chartres 2009

Tambyeff Raphael was born May 7, 1936.

From the age of four, he learned piano.
In Paris at the École César Franck and at the National Conservatory, Raphael Tambyeff study Harmony, Counterpoint, the Fugue, the history of music, and of course Organ and Improvisation .

His first post of organist at the age of 15 years.
Holder called the Great Organs of Our Lady of Grace de Passy, ​​in 1963, it is also since 1979, holds the Great Organs of Crematorium Père Lachaise.

His interest in contemporary music earned her many creations. He gives numerous concerts in France and abroad. Guest festivals, it also assists in Radio France.

Rigor, but also his desire to communicate, plus the natural gifts as a teacher, makes a teacher loved and sought after. It is part of many examination boards and international competitions.

Italian organist and musicologist. He studied at the conservatories of Bologna and Paris and the University of Padua and taught the organ in Bologna, Bolzano and Parma, and music history at Bologna and Fribourg. He has been a pioneer in organ restoration and his performances of older music combine his musicology and practical musicianship.

Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini has been professor of musicology at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) since 1965. Highly active as a performer, he has made numerous recordings and received the following awards : “Premio delle discografia Italiana”, “Schallplattenpreis der deutschen Phono-Akademie”, “Choc de la musique”, “Premio Antonio Vivaldi”, “Premio Massimo Mila”. Writer of many musicological articles, he has gained some special distinctions : Medaglia d’oro of the Italian Ministero Pubblica Istruzione, “Tiroler Adler” of Innsbuck, Honoris Causa from Edinburgh University, member of the Accademia di S.Cecilia in Rome.

Luigi Tagliavini’s recital for the International Performer of the Year Award was played at Saint Michael’s Episcopal Church.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Ferdinando_Tagliavini

Jacques Taddei, pianist and organist, member of the National Academy of Fine Arts and head of the Marmottan-Monet Museum died aged 66 on 24 June 2012.

Born in 1946 in Nice, he was the head of the Marmottan-Monet Museum since 2007 ; this museum contains the largest collection of works by Claude Monet in the world. Taddei’s life was dedicated to culture and more particularly to music. After studies in philosophy and at the Conservatoire de Paris, he was elected member of the Fine Arts Academy, in the Music Section, in 2001.

In 1980, he won the improvisation grand Prize at the International Organ Contest in Chartres. He then was the holder of the Basilica of Saint Clotilde’s organs from 1993 onwards. Being a performer, he recorded several albums. From 1987 to 2004, he was the head of the Conservatoire de Paris. He chaired the International Summer Academy of Nice and was at the same time the head of the Sacred Art Festival in Paris from 1993 to 2005.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Taddei

Balázs Szabó began his musical studies at the age of 15, graduated from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest and went on to continue his studies in Germany, in Italy and the Netherlands.
In 2010 he received the master organist title from the University of Music Wuerzburg with the mentoring of Prof. Dr. Christoph Bossert, and also concluded the only existing International Master for Organ Experts in Rome and Trossingen.
Finally 2015 he received the Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology.

He won first Prizes at renowned international organ competitions : in St. Maurice (2007 Swiss), Biarritz (2009 France), The Internationale Orgelwoche Nürnberg ION (2011 Germany) ; and 2nd prizes in Chartres (2014 France), Wiesbaden (2009 Germany) and Heidelberg (2008 Germany).
In 2010 he received the City of Miskolc Standard of Excellence Award, the Junior Prima Prize, and in 2015 the Múzsa-Award.
Since 2011 he holds a teaching position at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, and since 2013 also at the Béla Bartók conservatory.

Balázs Szabó concluded OrganExpert training in Rome and Trossingen, the world’s only degree course for those who will consult church or national institutions as well as private people with organ projects (designing new organs and copies of historical instruments, supervising the maintenance, conservation and restoration of existing instruments)- presided over by the Vatican (Council of culture). He is one of the 5 graduated OrganExperts in the world.

Balázs SZABÓ-ND de Paris 2014

http://organist.hu/