All Episodes

To know this instrument is to celebrate the totality of its wide-ranging repertoire, and one of today’s most broad-minded organists is Professor Craig Cramer from Notre Dame University in Indiana. He takes equal pleasure in contemporary compositions and historic music played on period instruments. We’ll hear him perform Bach in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Steinfeld, Germany. We also hear him in recital on the 19th-century Johnson organ at a convent in Mankato, Minnesota and on the new installation at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma. Craig shares his insights and experiences gained during his international recital tours.

This week’s Pipedreams program takes on the challenge of evoking vivid visual images - and with our ears we’ll view a procession in an ancient cathedral, a thunderstorm in the countryside, colorful landscapes in southern France, and an art show at a gallery. Along with works by Mulet, Ermand Bonnal, Eugene Reuchsel, and Lefebure-Wely, we’ll enjoy a complete performance of Mussorgsky’s famous keyboard impressions of paintings by his friend Victor Hartmann - visions of children playing near the Tuileries, the Market at Limoges, the Catacombs, the Ballet of the chicks in their shells and the Great Gate of Kiev. Nine soloists paint the town with organic colors. For more on Pictures at an Exhibition, read Paintings in Sound, by Michael Barone.

There’s no doubt that he’s fleet of foot and finger, but on this week’s Pipedreams broadcast Anthony Newman shows that his imagination is every bit as quick. We’ll hear him in works by Bach recorded in New York and Poland; in two concertos by Handel played with extravagant embellishments in concert with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; in some French miniatures presented at the Performing Arts Center in Naples, Florida; and in several of his own compositions and in duet performances with his wife Mary Jane. Don’t miss these imaginative insights and intrepid interpretations from one of America’s foremost virtuoso talents and thinkers.

This week’s Pipedreams broadcast takes you to the Bay Cities in California for a program of organ music on the lighter side. At the Oakland Paramount, Lew Williams and Jim Riggs pour on the charm, Kevin King tightens the ranks at the Berkeley Community Theatre, while across the water Simon Gledhill and Clark Wilson open doors at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, still one of the country’s best settings for Wurlitzer wonders. With a Mississippi Suite, a Stephen Foster Fantasy, a musical String of Pearls, plus some odes to the delights of local life, it’s a package frothy and delightful.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear On this week’s Pipedreams program, soloists Leo Abbott, Tom Murray, Fred MacArthur, Catharine Crozier, and Brian Jones will take you on a tour of historic instruments in Beantown - from the immense Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Christian Science Mother Church, the E.M. Skinner instrument at Old South Church moved from Saint Paul, MN, and the historic Hooks in Jamaica Plain and the Immaculate Conception Church.

Beyond the familiar Trumpet Tune, this week’s broadcast features many pieces by one of England’s foremost masters, one of his contemporaries and some later imitators. He’s justly celebrated, but sometimes for not quite the right reasons. Henry Purcell, the foremost English composer of the late seventeenth century, is our particular fascination on the next Pipedreams broadcast, when we’ll listen to everything he wrote for organ, plus some pieces that he DIDN’T, but to which his name is traditionally and tenaciously attached nonetheless. With period instruments and grand cathedral organs played by Robert Woolley, John Butt, John Scott, Davitt Moroney, and even Virgil Fox, we go on beyond the familiar Trumpet Tunes to hear Voluntaries and Marches, Anthems, Songs, and Dances, looking back through 3 centuries in tribute to the memory of one of Britain’s famous past masters.

We pick up the contrapuntal thread from last week and continue with some additional adventures. Bach left Die Kunst der Fuge incomplete, perhaps by design, perhaps by oversight, perhaps due to ill health. Should one resist the temptation to imagine a conclusion? We don’t.

Bach may have considered this piece a theoretical study and not have intended The Art of Fugue to be performed at all, since he prepared it in open score and left the climax incomplete. On our next Pipedreams program, we give life to theory, as an international array of soloists leads us through Bach’s contrapuntal maze, this music which astounds the mind and delights the ear simultaneously. A fugue too many? Not to worry, we’ll provide a map to help you listen, and hand you all the keys necessary to open the doors of mystery. How does it end?

Everything has to start somewhere, and on this week’s Pipedreams broadcast it begins with some alpha wavesmusic in the key of A, beginning a scalar ascent through some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s best and best-loved works. Wolfgang Rübsam performs at the Martini Church in Groningen, the Netherlands; Kevin Bowyer solos in Odense, Denmark; and Daniel Chorzempa, David Roght, Hans Fagius, Noel Rawsthorne, Jean-Patrice Brosse, Thierry Mechler and E. Power Biggs all reveal the genius of Bach in preludes and fugues, fantasies and chorale settings.

Michael Barone reviews a summer selection of recent recordings of music by and related to Johann Sebastian Bach.

It’s an exciting discovery. On beyond the rock-bound coast, the lobsters and L.L. Bean, the state of Maine is a state of musicorgan music, specifically, as we reveal during a Down East tour with the Organ Historical Society of intriguing instruments from Saco to Stockton Springs. Thomas Murray plays the famous Kotzschmar organ at Portland’s City Hall, Marvin Mills explores a century-old Jardine organ in Yarmouth, Brian Jones plays a march in Turner Village, and Dana Robinson and Paul Tegels go the four-hand route on the 140-year-old Hook instrument at Saint John’s Church in Bangor. Join host Michael Barone for this idyllic trip through the highways and byways of Maine.

Even if we think we can take care of everything ourselves, all of us need a few friends, and this week’s Pipedreams program brings together the king of instruments and a variety of friendly collaborators. Of course, organs have plenty of their own flutes, but one more, blown by lungs rather than bellows, can add so much. We’ll hear also pieces for organ with piano, organ with chamber orchestra, organ and harp - now THAT’s a fine combination - and the great energy-maker organ and brass. Joan DeVee Dixon, Steven Egler, Frances Shelly, Marie-Bernadette Dufourcet, Jon Gillock and others show what a harmonious relationship is all about.

The old tunes have their charm, and the old instruments, too, as we revisit the beginnings of organ music; play on pipes that have been singing persuasively for four, five, and six hundred years; and remember that the matter of age directly relates to attitude. This week on Pipedreams you’ll hear instruments dating from the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries - instruments from Italy, Austria, France, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands - including the oldest in the world, still going strong.

It’s all so familiar but also the beginning of an uncharted adventure. This week’s Pipedreams program explores wedding music in its broader implications. We’ll have traditional processionals, historic works in celebration of a joy-filled day, exotic pieces from Finland and the Czech Republic songs and ballads about true, perfect and wondrous love, an anthem about an amiable dwelling place, and even a warning lest fools rush in. For June brides or newlyweds at any time of the year, it’s music which proclaims This is the Day.

They all have two things in common. One is their youth, in their teens and early twenties. The other is enthusiasm. Hear a pair of organ scholars from Oxford, Paul Weber and other students from Lawrence University in Wisconsin, AGO O’Neal, and the acclaimed 14-year-old German phenom Felix Hell. They play up a storm and make it plain to hear that they are “not just kidding around.”

Contrary to the notion that the organ is old-fashioned, this week’s Pipedreams broadcast takes a look at organ repertoire today, with a sampler of some engaging and accessible modern compositions from the upper Midwest. Leonard Danek plays his little bouquet, Flowers, David Cherwin shows us some of his hymn-preludes, John Eggert discovers an amazingly diverse collection of styles right in his own backyard, and Diane Meredith Belcher premiere’s Libby Larsen’s Aspects of Glory at an Organists Guild Convention.

This week on Pipedreams host Michael Barone gathers some friends together at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in Saint Paul for a concert in celebration of Pipedreams’ first compact disc release. It’s sort of a show-and-tell affair, with performances by Leonard Danek, Edward Berryman and Michael Ferguson in of some of their own works, one of which takes a Bachian-challenge to its triumphal conclusion. Monte Mason leads his splendid choirs, and Melanie Ninnemann teams up with Michael Barone for a sonorous organ duet. And Michael will even play a solo or two.

Sometimes faith is all that’s left. And all that’s needed when disaster strikes. All is not lost, and on the next Pipedreams broadcast, our music represents the rekindled spirits which responded to the horrific bombing in Oklahoma City, the devastating tremors of a Los Angeles earthquake, a hurricane in Charleston, South Carolina, and a chapel fire in Kent, England. Out of the rubble and despair rises harmony and new enthusiasm. Scott Raab, Wayne Foster, Kevin Bowyer, and Thomas Harmon show us the way with music of hope rekindled.