High and Scary

[JW]

I have recently played in two Victorian catholic churches (one by Pugin) where access to the organ requires climbing up very steep, narrow staircases, with the door to the organ loft opening outwards. One set of steps had no rail for the top few steps, the other was a spiral staircase with a rope hanging down instead of a rail. I was scared enough to think carefully before I agree to play in those churches again. Going up wasn't too bad but going down was awful. The more recent one was worse because I've just damaged knee ligaments.

Now, although I admit to suffering a little from vertigo, I have climbed Snowdon and Ben Nevis and stood at the top of the WTC in my time so I can't be a total wuss. Has this happened to anyone else? We seem to have disabled ramps to the doors of our churches but no consideration for the increasingly elderly organists and choirs who struggle up to organ lofts every Sunday. Are the churches opening themselves up to litigation if an organist, or worse still a chorister, is seriously injured or killed?

[JW]

Organs like Cologne Cathedral's must be interesting to access and play:
http://www.koelner-dom.de/16955.html?&L=1

[Southern Comfort]

Organs like Cologne Cathedral's must be interesting to access and play:
http://www.koelner-dom.de/16955.html?&L=1

If I remember rightly, the efficient Germans have installed a lift to get up to this one. I think it runs up the back of the pillar on the right of the organ as you look at it.

[HallamPhil]

I can recall trying to catch up with Marie Ducrot, organist of Laon cathedral as she showed me up the delapidated spiral staircase to the magnificent instrument at the west end. She was blind and nobody had told her that the light bulbs had blown so she had no idea why I could not keep up with her 70-year old pace!

I went on to play the magnificat fugue of Bach during which she, disagreeing with my organo pleno registration (and favouring a more 'douce vierge' interpretation) aimed a kick at the ventil she knew so well and clobbered my right ankle in the process. Health and Safety in the workplace? - Je crois que non!

[promusica]

One local church recently installed a lift, without planning permission, up to the organ gallery, eradicating one-quarter of a beautiful mosaic floor in the atrium of the church. Choir were happy, but those into visual, rather than aural, aesthetics, were not.
It also reminds me of playing in a concert a few years ago in the Church of Sant' Agnese in Rome. I was playing both the piano downstairs and the organ upstairs in the top gallery at varying times in the programme. Adding to the difficulty were the renovations that were taking place in the stairs and gallery area, resulting in maze of stepladders, temporary steps and platforms, piping and electrical conduits that had to be traversed in order to go from piano to organ during a choral unaccompanied piece. Red-faced and out-of-breath I was for every piece that I played. Another, less hazardous, difficulty was that the sustain piano on the hired digital piano didn't work. Normally I take performances in my stride, but not this one...