Kevin Bowyer

In my career as a player of contemporary organ music I've played most of the notorious, "super-difficult" pieces—Iannis Xenakis' Gmeeoorh, Brian Ferneyhough's Sieben Sterne, Niccolò Castiglioni's Sinfonie Guerriere et Amorose, etc. Sorabji's First Organ Symphony makes all those pieces look like grade 2 finger exercises. And Organ Symphony 2 makes Organ Symphony 1 look like—a grade 2 finger exercise.

The lengths are also considerable: the Second Symphony alone is over an hour longer than Messiaen's complete organ music put together. The Second Symphony was premiered in 2010 and there were several postponements due to the difficulty of learning it. The Third Organ Symphony is expected to be premiered in 2022. Bowyer has also produced new typeset editions of Sorabji's three organ symphonies.

Since 2008 he has been able, with the support of the Glasgow University Trust, to be engaged almost exclusively in preparing for performances of Sorabji's three organ symphonies, the difficulties of which he describes thus:

He was organist of the Parish of Warwick from 1989 until 1998; during this time, he taught around the country for the St Giles International Organ School. In 2005 he was appointed university organist at the University of Glasgow (with access to the Harrison & Harrison/Willis organ in the University Memorial Chapel), while continuing his teaching career at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. New projects include the annual Glasgow International Organ Festival and Glasgow Pipeworks series of recitals of new music for organ.

While a student, he performed the complete organ symphonies of Charles-Marie Widor, Louis Vierne and Marcel Dupré (none of which he has yet recorded), and the complete organ music of Olivier Messiaen. He was able to do this because, he says, "When I was 21, I developed a technique that allowed me to learn a French organ symphony every month" and "always started at the end and then worked backwards." His debut recital was at the Royal Festival Hall in 1984.

Kevin John Bowyer (/ˈ b oʊ j ər / ; born 9 January 1961) is an English organist, known for his prolific recording and recital career and his performances of modern and extremely difficult compositions.

Bowyer was born on 9 January 1961 in Southend-on-Sea, England. He sang in a choir and learnt the piano accordion and organ as a child. When the church where he practised refused to let him carry on practising, he says: "I went and had a key cut to the church and I got in anyway." He attended Cecil Jones High School in Southend, and studied at the Royal Academy of Music from 1979 to 1982 with organists Christopher Bowers-Broadbent and Douglas Hawkridge, harpsichordist Virginia Black, and Paul Steinitz. After graduation, he studied for two years with David Sanger after winning a Countess of Munster scholarship. When given a list of music to prepare at his first meeting with Sanger, he didn't realise that it was a term's work and had learnt it all by the next week.

That it [Sorabji's First Organ Symphony] is finally becoming known, more than sixty years later [than it was published, in 1925], is due entirely to the uniquely enterprising spirit, astounding prowess and unending and unbending patience and dedication of the most outstanding organist of his generation, who, in his continuing work in preparing for performance and recording Sorabji's Second and Third Organ Symphonies (which of necessity includes fair-copying them longhand), is singlehandedly rewriting the history of organ music since Liszt.