ON THE RECORD | James McVinnie
Organist and keyboard player James McVinnie began his career at the organs of some of the UK’s most revered places of worship, including time spent as Sub-Organist at St Paul’s Cathedral, and Assistant Organist at Westminster Abbey. In the years since, he has gone on to become one of classical music’s most captivating and innovative performers.
He joins us at Norfolk & Norwich Festival this year as Artist in Residence, where he will play two distinctive shows. First, Infinity Gradient, a grand collaboration between James McVinnie and composer Tristan Perich, scored for solo organ and 100 speakers in 1bit audio. And later, at St Peter Mancroft, where he’ll put the organ through its paces in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Clavier-Übung III, a collection of organ music considered some of the most important and technically demanding that Bach ever composed.
Ahead of his residency in May, James kindly shared some of his most important tracks and a little bit about their significance.
25 February 2026
TRACK #1 | PAT METHENY – ‘LAST TRAIN HOME’
Last Train Home by Pat Metheny: my uncle is a bit of an audiophile — he showed me my first ever CD, aged 9-ish — and used to send tapes of albums he thought I would like to hear as a child. One of them was of Still Life (Talking) by Pat Metheny, a seminal album from the 1980s which blends lyrical jazz-fusion with Brazilian and Latin American influences. Last Train Home is made up of one long, unbroken melody played by Metheny on his amazing coral electric sitar, set above an obsessive sidedrum beat and synth strings, culminating in an ecstatic wordless refrain sung by a chorus of male voices. I loved it so much as a child that I wore the tape out. Listening back now, it’s an obvious and perfect symbiosis of melody and harmony — the purest interaction of horizontal and vertical musical information — the basis for all counterpoint from across the centuries.
TRACK #2 | GIOVANNI PIERLUIGI DA PALESTRINA– ‘KYRIE’
Speaking of counterpoint, my next track is by the Godfather of Renaissance musical polyphony, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Palestrina is to music what Michelangelo is to art, sculpture and architecture, and the Kyrie from his Missa Papae Marcelli for me sums up the glories of 16th century music perfectly. For me the recording by the Tallis Scholars under their director Peter Phillips is nowhere bettered.
TRACK #3 | MICHEL PETRUCCIANI– ‘LIVE FROM THE THEATRE DES CHAMPS ELYSSES’
One from my teens by the French pianist Michel Petrucciani: his album Live from the Theatre des Champs Elysses. Petrucciani suffered from a ‘genetic disease that causes brittle bones and, in his case, short stature’. I remember seeing him at the Royal Festival Hall in the 1997—despite being no taller than 3 foot, his athleticism at the piano seemingly knew no bounds. The concert I saw took the same format as the album featured here, with a long 50 min continuous medley of standards woven ingenuously together, followed by some of his own original lyrical and soulful tunes. At the end of the concert, a friend came on stage and carried him—now exhausted and barely able to stand—off the stage, over his shoulder.
TRACK #4 | JESSICA WILLIAMS – ‘BLUE ABSTRACTION: PREPARED PIANO PROJECT’
One much more recent discovery this past month: Jessica Williams’s Blue Abstraction: Prepared piano project 1985—87. This is perhaps the best thing I’ve heard in a decade — only recently rediscovered and unreleased until now, this album features Williams’s own music, firmly rooted in the style of Thelonius Monk, but played on a piano which has been modified in the same way as John Cage’s ‘prepared piano’ works, offering a radical reshaping of the instrument’s sound. The result is totally extraordinary; it’s both otherworldly but familiar — an immensely listenable, approachable album which ‘moves between inward-looking melancholy, moments of grandiosity and a kind of freewheeling cacophony’.
TRACK #5 | ANDRAS SCHIFF – ‘PARTITA NO.4 IN D MAJORP, BWV 828: II. ALLEMANDE – LIVE’
Andras Schiff playing Bach live at the Bachfest Leipzig in 2010. Schiff is an idol of mine and a figure more than any other musician that has shaped the way I think about music and about Bach. One of the many ways in which his music making is so alluring to me — as well as his emotional and intellectual depth — is his palpable, childlike relish at physically playing this music. Children can teach us a lot about the joys of doing; play is something we can lose sight of as adults — Schiff’s playing, to me, is exactly that.
TRACK #6 | PETER HURFORD– ‘FUGUE IN E MINOR BWV 548’
Sticking with Bach, my next choice is Peter Hurford’s rendition of Fugue in E minor BWV 548 at the Rieger organ of Ratezburg Cathedral (on which there is a stop which, when pulled, opens a panel which reveals a small drinks trolley). Peter Hurford was the preeminent Bach player of the late 20th century who was the first to record Bach’s organ music on instruments built in a historically informed way, with mechanical key action, allowing the player greater control over the instrument and connection to the essence of the music. His playing was simply put, a revelation to the world in the 1960s, and still retains its incredible verve and joy today. Hurford was Master of Music at St Albans Cathedral from 1958–78, where I spent two formative years as organ scholar in the early 2000s. Peter was a regular but discrete presence at the Cathedral during my time there, and his general support and occasional guidance about making music on the organ was, and remains invaluable.
TRACK #7 | ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER– ‘CHROME COUNTY’
Chrome County by Oneohtrix Point Never, who ‘fuses warped ambient textures, fractured pop and digital decay into a nostalgic-yet-alien soundscape that feels like a corrupted memory of 1990s media’. I got to know this album in my early 30s alongside music from similar electronic spheres by Valgeir Sigurðson, Ben Frost, Squarepusher, Bon Iver etc. Apart from growing to love specifically this whole album, the act of assimilating totally new musical terrain was part of an invaluable chapter of artistic growth for me. The juxtaposition of various disparate electronic elements, specifically the use of a casio keyboard version of a pipe organ at the end of the track (frowned on by organ enthusiast purists), reframed the idea of synthesis and sound in music. This opened up the possibility to me of marrying electronic music with that of the traditional pipe organ, in such a project as…
TRACK #8 | TRISTAN PERICH & JAMES MCVINNIE– ‘INFINITY GRADIENT’
…Infinity Gradient by Tristan Perich, an hour long work for organ and 100 speakers which sound in primitive 1bit audio. A remarkable work with few precedents, Infinity Gradient is a duet between two musical instruments, millennia apart in conception. Shot through with dynamism, it is a work of colour and contrasts which coalesce into a unique, transcendent whole. has just been released on Erased Tapes, which we will perform in the grand setting of Norwich Cathedral on the evening of May 9th.