Here, belatedly, are a few more thoughts on the organ-and-orchestra repertory, in the wake of last month’s column on the subject. Michael Barone, prefacing his master list, points out how many orchestral works require an organ part, and how much is lost when some feeble electronic replica is substituted. In the column, I named three obvious cases: Mahler’s Second and Eighth Symphonies and Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. Barone also highlights, among others, Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony, Ives’s Fourth Symphony, Elgar’s Enigma, several big Respighi pieces, and Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass. (In October, the last-named received an exceptional performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Alan Gilbert conducting.) Barone writes: “Remove the organ from Tchaikovsky’s Manfred, Bartók’s Bluebeard, or Mahler’s Resurrection and you’ve got a flat soufflé.” It really is fairly crippling that New York’s two big concert halls both lack a proper organ.
There are some neglected gems to be found on Barone’s list, and orchestras with access to a concert organ should program them more often. A personal favorite is Jón Leifs’s Organ Concerto, an astonishingly bold piece completed in 1930. Medieval-sounding chants in parallel fifths, inspired by the old Icelandic practice of tvísöngur (twin-song), collide with pinwheeling triads and brazen dissonances. The core of the concerto is an immense, grittily orchestrated passacaglia of thirty variations. The opening is also very memorable:
From a recording on the BIS label, with En Shao conducting the Iceland Symphony and Björn Steinar Sólbergsson at the organ.
A plea also for Frank Martin’s Erasmi monumentum, a 1969 work honoring the quincentennial of Erasmus. Here the organ tends to brood behind and within the orchestra, representing the great Dutch humanist’s quizzical relationship with the world around him. There are three movements: “Homo pro se” (“A man unto himself”); “Stultitiae laus” (“In Praise of Folly”); and “Querela pacis” (“The Complaint of Peace”). The middle movement is a freewheeling scherzo in an irregularly dancing triple metre, with the organ cast in vernacular, irreverent guise. Martin was apparently unhappy with the result of his labors, but Erasmi monumentum is not only among his strongest late-period works but one of the most finely controlled, fully realized organ-and-orchestra pieces in the repertory. The YouTube video at the top of this post has Matthias Bamert conducting the London Philharmonic, with Leslie Pearson at the organ; the recording is from Chandos’s invaluable Martin cycle.
A fascinating subculture of the contemporary organ world involves the meeting of this oldest and grandest of instruments with avant-garde discourse — a confluence that goes back to pioneering postwar works of Messiaen, Ligeti, Hambraeus, and Kagel. Over in the UK, the composer-organist Lauren Redhead has given particular attention to music for organ and electronics; you can watch one of her recent programs on Vimeo here. See also her release entoptic landscape; version 1 of the title piece is scored for a sonorous blend of trombone, four tubas, and organ. In these parts, David Broome has been cultivating works for organ and electronics, notably in a Qubit Music concert last fall. You can here watch a video of David Bird’s Commercial Vignette, whose musical material is generated by barcodes for various products: Clorox bleach, a Red Bull, the complete Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc. I’m sorry to have missed the Qubit event, which also included Lisa Streich’s Seraph, for cello and organ.