Grammy Award-winning organist Paul Jacobs will play the 50^th Anniversary Music Scholarship Fund Fall Concert at the Methuen Memorial Music Hall on Sunday, September 15^th, at 3:00 P.M. Jacobs, who chairs the organ department at The Juilliard School, last performed at Methuen in October 2010. Of the celebrated touring organist, who has played the complete works of Bach, Messiaen, and Franck from memory, the reviews are in: An obliterating performance by one of the major musicians of our time.”- ​The New Yorker; Paul Jacobs is one of the great living virtuosos… he is utterly without artifice- The Washington Post; America’s leading organ performer– The Economist; A virtuoso of dazzling technical acumen– The New York Times.

In contrast to Methuen’s summer series concerts which are posted on YouTube, Jacobs’ concert will not be online. It will only be available to the in-person audience.

The 75-minute program opens with Mendelssohn’s Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 65, a powerful, four-movement work that begins with a majestic, brooding Allegro. After a quiet Adagio and a dramatic Andante recitativo, the piece concludes with a joyous Allegro assai vivace which is in essence an arpeggiated toccata.

The focus then shifts from Germany to France, with Belgian-born César Franck’s beautiful and plaintive Prelude, Fugue and Variation, Opus 18 (originally for harmonium and piano duet). The Prelude’s haunting B-minor melody, played on the oboe stop with flute accompaniment, has charmed many listeners. Franck dedicated it to French organist and composer Camille Saint-Saëns.

Charles Ives’s cheeky Variations on ‘America,’ written when he was a 17-year-old church organist slept in a barn for decades until 1949, when organist E. Power Biggs rediscovered and edited it for publication. It is now a popular Fourth of July celebration piece.

As a “seventh inning stretch” before the final selection, the audience will sing the hymn, “Come, Come Ye Saints.” With text written by one of the early Mormon pioneers who migrated to Utah and set to the music of a popular English folk tune, ‘All is Well,’ it expressed their hopes to find a better place to settle and live. Like the Mormons who were driven from their homes in Illinois, the Music Hall’s Walcker organ was banished from its original home on the stage of the old Boston Music Hall to make room for the newly formed Boston Symphony Orchestra. Happily, both ended up in better places where they would flourish — the Mormons in Salt Lake City and the Walcker organ in Methuen.

Liszt based his spectacular Fantasy and Fugue on the Chorale ‘Ad nos, ad salutarem undam’ on a motif from Meyerbeer’s Le prophète. This dramatic, nearly half-hour long musical tour de force makes for a perfect vehicle to displaying Jacobs’s virtuosity and the Methuen organ’s resources of color. In true Lisztian fashion, the great instrument will whisper and roar, in a stunning conclusion to the concert.

This program would be a “not to be missed” event when played by any talented organist. But to hear it performed entirely from memory by the incredibly gifted Paul Jacobs on the world-famous Walcker/Æolian-Skinner organ in the acoustically and architecturally stunning Methuen Memorial Music Hall will be a once-in-a-lifetime event!

Also, the concert will benefit a very worthy cause, the Music Hall Scholarships. Since 1974 the Music Hall has annually awarded scholarships to local high school graduates who will major in a music-related field in college. To date, a total of $78,000 has been awarded to 99 promising young musicians.

A number of Music Hall scholarship recipients have achieved prominence in their respective fields. To name just a few:  Joseph Olefirowicz (1990), now the Director of Music at The First Church (UCC) of Nashua, New Hampshire, has conducted Broadway musicals in Stuttgart, Berlin, and at the Vienna Volksoper where, thanks to a YouTube video, he became known as the “Dancing Conductor.” Andrew Scanlon (1997) taught organ at Duquesne University and East Carolina University before becoming Associate Organist & Choirmaster at Church of the Advent in Boston in 2021. Dominick DiOrio (2002), who has won prizes in choral composition and performance, is professor of music in choral conducting and chair of the Choral Conducting Department at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

This concert, sponsored by Leon-Diego Fernández, will provide an ideal opportunity to hear great organ music in a great space and simultaneously benefit young musicians. It is part of Methuen’s Showcase Series, which features reserved seating. Tickets HERE

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