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The 11th April last year may very well turn out to have been one of the most important dates in the history of British organ music. On that evening in Westminster Cathedral, lain Simcock gave the first performance of Francis Pott's Christus, a Passion Symphony for Organ. At a time when the majority of our own contemporary repertoire consists of elegant miniatures or pieces relying heavily on the special sound effects the organ is capable of producing, it seems almost too good to be true that a composer of proven and prize-willing ability should, without even being commissioned to do so, choose to write a full-scale cyclical organ symphony of Mahlerian dimensions.

Christus is in five movements, which trace the Coming of Christ, then Gethsemane, the Way of the Cross, Golgotha, the Deposition, Christ in the Tomb and finally the Resurrection. Whilst the programmatic elements in the piece apply with varying degrees of precision, the musical themes used (including a chorale-like tune) are of particular importance in giving the work its great overallcohesion, beginning with the very opening four note motif. The intention of the first movement entitled 'LOGOS' is to suggest the Holy Spirit contending with a resistant pagan force; Marcel Dupre, in the first movement of his own Passion Symphony, depicted an agitated 'world in chaos awaiting the saviour', but Pott adopts a different approach, exploring first the idea of the wandering spirit in outer darkness seeking light, and rising through a gradual escalation of mood to a climax which, in the composer's words "though debatably triumphant, remains austere, aloof from any wholly unequivocal victory", thereby leading the listener into the second movement. Here, Christ is portrayed as a "spectral, hypnotic apparition embracing all the despair of human suffering and self- condemnation" suggested in the lines by Thomas Merton that head the movement.

This seems a good moment to consider the religious motivations of the work: each of the movements is prefaced by quotations from the Bible or from religious poetry, and in a recent interview for Radio 4, Francis Pott stressed the importance of Easter as being the culmination of the church year, and therefore of his Passion Symphony. In particular the Crucifixion itself, as a living symbol and atonement of all that goes wrong in the world, is central to the conception of the work, just as it is central to the Christian faith.

The third movement, which begins as a passacaglia, portrays Christ's serenity and "unreproaching distress" as he is besieged by the uncomprehending mob, and leads into the scherzo which brings us to Golgotha and the Crucifixion. Here, as one might expect, the climax is long and insistent before collapsing into an "unsettled darkness".

After these climactic events, the restful and dynamically modest nature of the fourth movement ("Viaticum"), is both musically welcome and apposite in its portrayal of a world locked in the sleep of the tomb. Moreover, it provides the perfect foil for the thunderous opening declarations of the fifth and final movement ('Resurrection'). Here, the composer has tried to project the resurrection not as a 'fait accompli', but as a "cosmic struggle towards a hard-won ultimate triumph". To this end, how appropriate that Pott should introduce a fugue, which incorporates musical intervals derived from previous movements. The final sections of the work are best summed up by the composer's use of the phrase War in Heaven' (from the Book of Revelation).

Christus is the work of a composer who has a demonstrably clear grasp of compositional form and structure - instanced by the clever and original use of musical techniques from the familiar (passacaglia, fugue, stretto, etc.) to the less well-known ('cancrizans' in which a melodic strand is heard simultaneously forwards and backwards!) - but much more significantly, this musical 'armoury' is harnessed to a truly original imagination that has resulted in a musical language that is not only new, but beautiful and accessible to the listener. The work is long by conventional standards (about two hours and twenty minutes), but as the composer says, if the work seems ambitious, then that ambition resides in the human or spiritual, rather than the technical dimensions: in other words the size is dictated by what the music is seeking to express. Although the outer movements could be performed separately, it should be borne in mind that the work is cyclical, and in any case, as those who have been present at performances have found, the music generates an energy and an imagery that renders insignificant the mere passing of time...

As far as the performer is concerned, the work demands a considerable amount of stamina as can be imagined, but the technical requirements are never insurmountable: although Pott is a pianist rather than an organist, he has a sure grasp of what is and what is not possible on the organ, and the music whilst not easy, nevertheless remains firmly within achievable bounds. As lain Simcock says, it is never "mere empty virtuosity", but is always "rhythmically exciting and varied, using the full spectrum of organ colour".

As I suggested at the opening of this brief account, it may be that Christus will mark the beginning of a new interest in the organ as a 'symphonic' medium for contemporary British composers. For those players and listeners who have longed for a British work to equal the emotional power of those by Reger, Liszt, Eben, Dupre et al, the wait may well be over.

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