Kenneth Shenton writes:
DESPITE enjoying worldwide success, the organist Jennifer Bate, who died on 25 March, aged 75, remained very happily rooted in the family’s longstanding north London home.
Home, too, was St James’s, Muswell Hill, near by, where, for 54 years, from 1924 until 1978, her father, Horace Alfred Bate, was its renowned organist. After the church was burnt and the organ destroyed in the Second World War, he oversaw the installation of a new three-manual Harrison instrument in the 1950s. Later, it was there that Jennifer received her first organ lessons, entertained Olivier Messiaen, made recordings, became a generous benefactor, and, in 2010, led its organ restoration.
Born on 11 November 1944, Jennifer Lucy Bate was educated at Tollington School before reading music at the University of Bristol. She began her professional career as a librarian at the London School of Economics, but, with time on her hands during the student riots of 1968, she began to revivify her organ technique. It was particularly thanks to her father’s agreeing to mentor and support her both artistically and financially over the course of an initial five years that she felt able to embark on a solo-recital career. Immediately finding success, in 1972, she was the first organist to be selected by the Greater London Arts Association as one of its Young Musicians.
Such was her progress that three years later, while on a visit to London, Messiaen visited St James’s, Muswell Hill, to hear her demonstrate his music. It was the beginning of a productive friendship as she became one of the foremost proponents of his work. Her recordings of his complete organ works, begun on the organ in Beauvais Cathedral, won awards throughout Europe. In October 1986, at a packed Westminster Cathedral, she gave the British première of his largest work for organ, Livre du Saint-Sacrement. Six months later, at Messiaen’s own church in Paris, l’Église de la Sainte-Trinité, she committed the work to disc, her reading carrying the composer’s endorsement.
Interspersing her extensive discography were regular offerings from her local church. After her 1983 recording of “The Organ Music of Lennox Berkeley and Peter Dickinson”, all the royalties from two anthologies of British music, “Stanford and his Contemporaries” and “Elgar and his Contemporaries”, were donated to the St James’s Organ Fund. Keen to bring the instrument to a younger audience, she then devised “Young Person’s Guide to the King of Instruments” and “Sounds of the Merry Organ” (Hyperionm 1983), each designed to illustrate and explain the instrument’s music and mechanics. From these gradually developed the annual Jennifer Bate Organ Academy for women organists, aged 13-21.
Throughout her long career, Bate was never shy in championing a range of contemporary composers, many of whom created works especially for her. These included Peter Dickinson, Naji Hakim, Charles Camilleri, Peter Racine Fricker, Flor Peeters, Ian Parrott, Andrzej Panufnik, and William Mathias. Indeed the very last work Mathias was planning before his death in July 1992, was a suite for Bate, entitled Les Emaux. Its extensive movements were to be based on the 32 16th-century panels depicting the life of Christ, from the prophesies of his coming to crucifixion and resurrection, to be found in the church in which he worshipped when in France.
Bate also enjoyed rewarding artistic partnerships with the singer, Ian Partridge, and the trumpeters Bram Wiggins and David Mason. She also worked closely on early music with Carl Dolmetsch, and performed and recorded Baroque chamber repertoire as a member of the Tate Music Group. Since her father was also a well-known and successful composer of hymn tunes, it is perhaps no surprise that such works form the building-blocks of so many of Bate’s own original compositions for the instrument. She cleverly utilises everything from Martin Shaw’s Little Cornard to Conditor Alme Siderum.
Bate was granted honorary Italian citizenship in 1996, after 20 years of concert-giving, and appointed OBE in 2008. She was also appointed to the rank of Chevalier in the Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur in recognition of her skill as an organist and her contribution in making Messiaen’s organ works more widely known worldwide.
She married George Thalben-Ball in 1968. The marriage was later annulled.
Anne Marsden Thomas adds: Jennifer is also mourned by the Society of Women Organists (SWO). A career as an international concert organist is perhaps one of the most challenging, and particularly so for a woman; Jennifer’s success and her courage have motivated countless other women organists, and this inspired us to invite her to become a Patron of the society. The society is dedicated to the recruitment, support, and promotion of female organists, and Jennifer responded enthusiastically to our invitation, as she immediately recognised the work needed to encourage girls and women to succeed on what has for long been falsely regarded as a man’s instrument.
She was certainly no “sleeping” patron: she attended the Society’s launch at the Royal Festival Hall in February last year, and she offered us a celebrity recital in Bloomsbury Baptist Church, from which she sadly had to withdraw after her diagnosis. The latter will still go ahead, on 28 November, with Jane Parker-Smith as the celebrity organist. Additionally, at Jennifer’s request, SWO will organise a concert in her memory when the pandemic is over. We will always remember Jennifer for her remarkable music-making and her courageous and generous spirit.