If this music makes you think of weddings and beautiful brides, you’re right on target. This broadcast is a collection of preludes, processionals and other pages in praise of matrimony and the emotions and circumstances which lead us to the altar. Whether it be Handel’s Hornpipe or Mendelssohn’s familiar Wedding March, a Salute to Love by Elgar, or Duke Ellington’s In a sentimental mood, you’ll be amazed by the various ways composers have dealt with love and its ramifications.
Trumpet tunes and blessings, salutes to love and lullabies, it’s all part of the package when two people tie the knot at a June wedding, and we provide the music appropriate to a chapel or cathedral creating Matrimonial Magic.
It’s time to take the organ out of its religious context, and enjoy it out of doors at Balboa Park in San Diego. We’ll also visit other venues where summer concerts win new friends for the King of Instruments. From the Methuen Music Hall in Massachusetts to the Mormon Tabernacle, from Balboa Park in San Diego to the Berks County Museum in Pennsylvania, we celebrate a season of adventure and discovery, a sampler of seasonal recital venues coast to coast. It’s all about having some Summer Fun.
From an historic monastery in Austria to Princeton University chapel, this week’s show features the work of three composers who happen to be born under the sign of The Twins [as in astrology, not baseball].
We’ll hear a Sonata for Organ and Strings by Daniel Pinkham, Gospel Preludes and a Princeton premiere by William Bolcom, and tantalizing toccatas from the 17th century by Georg Muffat. Join in as we celebrate their 80th, 65th and 250th late spring birthdays with a chest full of Gemini Jewels.
One thing he never lacked was grace and charm. This week, we explore the work of a prodigiously talented yet short-lived minor English master. Whether writing for cathedral or parish use, or for his later involvement as a municipal organist, Percy Whitlock’s gentle and engaging personality made many friends for him. His compositions were conservative for his time but each possess a rich emotion and sly wit. After one hundred years, we remember him still, with A Percy Whitlock Centenary Tribute.
This week we celebrate the inauguration of a new instrument, the Davis Concert Organ at the Winspear Centre in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To date, it is the largest production from the shop of the Letourneau Organ Company of Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec. With 96 stops and more than 6500 pipes, it lays claim to being the biggest mechanical-action instrument to be installed in a concert hall in modern times.
Christopher Herrick shows it off in a colorful collection of solo works, and Rachel Laurin teams up with Marion Bernardi and the Edmunton Symphony for the world premiere of grand new concerto by Jacques Hetu. In cooperation with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, we are pleased to present Ferrand Letourneau’s Winspear Wonder.
From sprightly Renaissance dances to grandious concertos, this week’s show celebrates the many diverse elements that make organ music so remarkable. The fact that this instrument dates from the 16th century adds a sense of history. Beyond that, however, style, emotion, and compositional and mechanical ingenuity all play a part in creating an art filled that creates a multi-faceted experience ranging from restraint to rejoicing.
Whether in a charming transcription, an anthem accompaniment, or a zesty concert finale, the king of instruments does it all. Discover it yourself as we listening to recently released compact discs from around the world. We’re Going On Record.
You know how it is, one thing leads to another. This week’s program is no exception and put itself together quite magically to celebrate the Centenary of English composer Lennox Berkeley. There are works by Berkeley, of course, but also a prelude by Dr. John Bull, a Voluntary or Fugue by Boyce or Burney, a sonata by Bairstow and a heroic march by Brewer. In the end, it’s four centuries of keyboard composers creating a melodious miscellany.
Hope you enjoy the works of Six ‘B’s from Britain.
It’s almost like a peal of bells, and why not, since this week’s program is all about praise. The phrase We praise you, oh God. We acknowledge you to be the Lord… has inspired composers through the centuries. Dupré, Attaignant, Buxtehude, and Demessieux, have each created monuments on this text and we’ll also listen to a very snappy setting from the French Baroque by Charpentier, as well as chorale versions by Britten and Berlioz.
The celebrations continue through time and traditions, as we shout our praise: Te Deum!
Travel with us to the City of Brotherly Love. We’ll listen to a diverse group of instruments of various tone and texture, from a little Dieffenbach chamber organ that’s more than 200 years old to the lavish 1931 Skinner organ at Girard College. Our music also covers the gamut, from a Colonial voluntary to a Mexican toccata.
Celebrate two centuries of the art of organbuilding in America, with a sampler of resilient, vintage instruments recorded in and around Philly. My friends in the Organ Historical Society and I invite you to join us for a celebration of The Pipes of Philadelphia.
The times, they are a-changing, and these days of evolving springtime bring equal measure of mystery and marvel. This week, we muse on this transformation of life with music for the spring festival of rebirth. French, German and American composers reflect on the Easter message. Marcel Dupré ponders the unknowable, Pierre Cochereau celebrates with dances and jubilation, while Richard Webster trumpets a Paschal Fanfare for the Risen Christ.
Celebrate the coming of spring with music inspired by the Easter Festival. In parish chapels and historic cathedrals, we rejoice in Resurrection Revelations.
If you naturally think of the pipe organ as a church instrument, think again. This week, we celebrate three organ installations from concert Halls in China, Australia and England. Carol Williams shows off the Connecticut-built Austin organ in the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, Thomas Heywood gives us the before-and-after treatment at Melbourne Town Hall, where the 1929 Hill organ was expanded and modernized by the Schantz Company of Ohio, and at the new concert hall in Birhmigham, England, Thomas Trotter pulls out all the stops.
Click and listen to concert music for concert instruments. This week, we’re not in a church but Out in the Hall.
The King of Instruments enjoys a long and proud tradition. This week we’ll celebrate this heritage with instruments in all of the major European countries where the art of the organ was born and fostered. The peripatetic Charles Burney, who wrote much about organs and organists encountered during his famous travels, contributes a tune to our medley as do Domenico Scarlatti, Vicente Hervas, Michel Corrette, and Georg Böhm.
Everything old IS new again as we listen to historic instruments playing German, French, English, Italian, and Spanish music, all with perfect accent, the way it was meant to be. We honor tradition as the voices from these old pipes reveal the Wisdom of the Ages.
This week’s program redirects Richard Wagner’s focus to an instrument which sounds as lofty as any of as his own artistic ideas. Unlike Bach, Wagner never composed for solo organ but LIKE Bach his music adapts well to transcription. Listen to and enjoy your favorite overtures, choruses, arias and scenes convincingly transformed by such keyboard greats as Thomas Murray, Simon Preston, Carlo Curley and Anthony Newman.
Hold onto your horses. It’s opera without singers, pipes without preludes and fugues, and an atypical anomally as some of the grandest 19th century music is magically transformed in a manner possible only in the realm of the King of Instruments. This week we discover a surprise in every measure when we find Wagner at the Console.
Although we’ll never be able to find a definitive Bach organ, we do know where he played and the sorts of instruments which influenced him. On this week’s show, we’ll visit the church in Arnstadt, Bach’s first important job, drop in at the Castle Church in Lahm, where he helped a cousin with the organ design, and at Altenburg Palace where, later, his best pupil, Krebs, was employed. We’ll hear an instrument by Silbermann, who Bach respected but with whom he did not see eye-to-eye, also the new organ at Saint Thomas Church, Leipzig, modeled after one in Bach’s hometown, and the extraordinary Hildebrandt masterpiece in Naumburg, which we think Bach designed.
Bach traveled the countryside as Germany’s foremost recitalist, and we follow his footsteps to hear the sounds he knew and the organs which were important in his growth as an artist. Come with us to Arnstadt, Altenburg, Naumburg, Leipzig and Lahm, as we revisit history and celebrate Bach’s Royal Instruments.
It’s J.S. Bach, but with a difference. An entire additional voice grafted onto a simple two-part invention makes a fiendishly difficult trio, but that’s just for starters. This week, we take a step beyond our usual understanding of Bach and listen to some of his most challenging scores brought to the edge by provocative modern interpretors. We’ll hear a jazzy reworking of the Air on the G-String, a Dutch rock musician’s take on the famous Toccata, and Porter Heaps’ Swinging After Bach.
From youthful virtuosity to arrangements beyond-the-pale, performers, composers and transcribers visit with the great master from Leipzig and invite him out for a real trip. Be prepared for excitement and surprise as we take Bach on the Wild Side.
They’ve come a long way, from motherhood and home life to professions and entrepreneurial adventures. This week’s broadcast celebrates the contributions of women as composers for the organ. From modern day talents such as Libby Larsen, Margaret Sandresky and Emma Lou Diemer, to the once neglected pioneering energies of Maria Theresa von Paradies, Gracia Baptista and Fanny Mendelssohn, we’ll enjoy a variety of styles and textures including thoughtful chorale-preludes, graceful dances, and vigorous toccatas.
Christa Rakich provides anecdotal introductions and performances recorded at Columbia University Chapel in New York City on Women’s Work and the ‘better half’ of organ music.
Major works are played by some bright new stars in the organ firmament, recorded in competition at the Calgary International Organ Festival.
They earned their gold, and you’ll hear why as this week’s show features prize-winners from Canada’s renowned Calgary International Organ Competition. Vincent Dubois surprised even himself, while the improvisations of Laszlo Fassang, the deft playing of Canadian music by Jonathan Oldengarm, Iveta Apkalna’s Bach, and Clive Driskill-Smith’s excellent ensemble guaranteed these artists a share in some of the best money a young organist can earn.
We share their musicianship, and their moments of glory with you, in the second of three broadcasts in a series of Calgary Festival Highlights. Don’t miss a note of it, they won’t.
