Episodes: 2004

This week, we’ll reflect upon events form the past year and take a look at some projections for the future.

Taken from many nations, the music on this week’s program adds a distinctive flavor to our Christmas celebration.

Join us for a merry mingling of composer and performers, celebrating the holiday season.

Preluding the Christmas festival, we play the ‘waiting game’ with a collection of music for the Advent season.

…whether in Renaissance style or rhumba, when the pipe organ’s in the mood there’s no better partner. This week’s program is a display of the kinetic energy that surrounds the King of Instruments.

At Ann Arbor’s 75-year-old Michigan Theatre, an aging pipe organ served as keystone to the downtown’s heritage preservation.

…In tribute to the patron saint of music, concert performances on the recently installed, multi-faceted pipe organ at the Cathedral of Saint Cecilia in Omaha, Nebraska.

This week we celebrate the 125th anniversary of Canada’s most prominent organ maker: Casavant Frères.

This week we visit three recent and noteworthy pipe organ installations in American concert halls.

This week we’re taking a walk on the darker side with some spooky and surprising evocations of things that go ‘bump in the night’, music for Hallowe’en.

Michael Barone took Pipedreams Live! to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and introduced these performances by area organists at Central Reformed Church.

Join us as we listen to live concert performances that remind us of the challenges performers face and the delights we listeners enjoy.

Listen to a sampling of three recent installations of American-built instruments in Switzerland, California and Nebraska. An additional recital program from Omaha’s Saint Cecilia Cathedral will be aired in November to celebrate of the Feast of Saint Cecilia, patron of musicians. And did you know that the case for the Lausanne Fisk was devised by Giorgetto Giugiaro, designer of the Maserati Bora and Volkswagen Golf and hundreds of other automobiles?

Craig R. Whitney visits us to talk about the traditions and power of the pipe organ in the United States.

Come with us as we visit the 200 year old organ built by David Tannenberg. Originally constructed for the Home Moravian Church, it now can be heard in it’s own room at the Old Salem Visitor Center.

Music of the reluctant French virtuoso and pioneering genius, Charles-Valentin Alkan [1813-1888], composed originally for pedal piano, plays brilliantly on the pipe organ. Considered by many to be the virtuosic equal of Franz Liszt, and also both friend and neighbor to Frederic Chopin, Alkan was a curious, reclusive figure on the mid-century Parisian scene. His numerous works, virtually all for piano, abound with digital challenges and provocative creative twists. Alkan wrote both a four-movement symphony and a massive three-movement concerto, both for solo piano without orchestra. Later, another friend, Cesar Franck, dedicated his own pioneering solo organ symphony…the Grande Piece Symphonique…to Alkan. Franck also published organ editions of the pieces to be heard in the course of this program, which Alkan created for that ‘dead-end’ Romantic-era instrument, the pedal piano, a standard piano with an additional organ-like clavier for the feet. Alkan was particularly fascinated by this device, and even left money in his will to fund a pedal piano course at the Paris Conservatory. Our broadcast includes a complete performance of Alkan’s Thirteen Prayers, Opus 64, and selections from Eleven Grande Preludes, Opus 66 and the Little Preludes in the Eight Plainchant Modes [1859].

Whether they trained abroad, trained at home, or relocated to or from Europe, the composers of these diverse works ultimately share an American passport.

Come along to Royal Albert Hall in London where we’ll hear the newly-restored Willis-Harrison organ, the largest organ in the UK, in concert performances taken from the 2004 BBC Proms season. Due to contract limitations, this program is not available in our online audio archive.