Couples at the console revisit the remarkably flexible repertoire for organ duet.
The mammoth 10,000-pipe former Minneapolis Auditorium Kimball organ, still awaiting restoration and relocation in the city’s new Convention Center, provides some music from its Farewell for Now concert with the Minnesota Orchestra and recordings taped just days before it was dismantled for storage back in 1987.
Performers include Edward Berryman, Tom Hazleton, Robert Vickery and Hector Olivera with conductor Jahja Ling. Unfortunately, restoration plans for this unique instrument have fallen into limbo. We hope it won’t be too long before there’s good news to report. Meanwhile, enjoy these remarkable archive artifacts. In particular, Olivera’s performance of the Jongen is an audio tour de force.
Solo organ and choral selections feature the 153-rank Schantz instrument in New Jersey’s most imposing cathedral church.
More music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Leo Sowerby, in celebration of his 100th anniversary.
Resident musician Mary Preston inaugurates the 3-manual, 48-rank mechanical-action instrument designed by Los Angeles builder Manuel Rosales for King of Glory Lutheran Church in Dallas, Texas, recorded March 26, 1995.
We journey back in time on our next Pipedreams program, to the days when movies were real events and movie palaces were the most opulent buildings in the land. The sound of the theatre organ is filled with nostalgia, but these remarkable, resilient instruments are even more vital today, as we discover in conversation with American Theatre Organ Society president Stephen Adams while listening to seventeen different artists and installations. We’ll travel from the Granada Theatre in Kansas City to the Vancouver Orpheum, from Wichita’s Century II Convention Center to the Sanfillipo Music Salon near Chicago. Whether in tunes by Gershwin or Jerome Kern, Chopin or Richard Rodgers, every generation finds its true love in the world of the Mighty Wurlitzer where Everything Old is New Again, this week on Pipedreams.
A tribute to the oldest continuously functional organ-building firm in the United States, Austin Organs, Inc., of Hartford, CT.
Concert performances on the 1987 Kney organ at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, MN.
Selected works from the organ and other diverse accompaniments, featuring unusual repertoire.
A journey of enhanced perception, guided by Rollin Smith, Towards an Authentic Interpretation of the Organ works of Cesar Franck, with notable and historic examples.
A New Year’s review of some of the most recently available organ music on compact disc, a ‘host’s choice‘.
Reflecting on what has been and what may be in the realm of the King of Instruments, with audo postcards, letters from listeners, reviews of some new recordings, and enough of a party atmosphere to ring out the Old Year and ring in the New Year, too.
From San Diego to Brooklyn, from churches and theaters, this collection offers warm and friendly greetings of glad tidings and good cheer.
An international collection of arrangements for instruments and voices.
A progression of gladsome Gallic variants on holiday melodies.
There’s a song in the air and it’s about change. The future is just around the corner… but not quite, not yet. On this week’s broadcast, we’ll ponder the problem of the unknown, with music for Advent, including an atmospheric pharaphrase by Hans-Andre Stamm, a collection of Bach chorale-preludes, and an improvised symphonic movement by Marcel Dupré that he recorded with compelling persuasiveness in his 79th year.
…a selective, annotated autumn survey of new releases of organ music on compact disc
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.
