Touring organist extraordinaire and genial tour guide Ken Cowan led a grateful Groton Hill crowd of organ-concert newbies and cognoscenti through five quite different instruments spanning centuries and continents via the Hauptwerk Organ of 15 Organs. Through the voices of 40 speakers blasting and whispering with 49,600 watts, the brilliantly engineered compendium of the sampled sounds opened our ears to historic and decidedly varied instruments in Holland, England, France, and Buffalo.
The difficulty of Cowan’s feat of performing from memory cannot be understated; in our experience, only he and Paul Jacobs have been able to command both the notes and registrations with such cognitive mastery. And this does matter for audiences, since organ recitals can be dry if they are delivered by the book. The possibilities of combining stops to color, build, and diminish sounds can be a seamless art or a lurching, hiccupping annoyance. The sonic resources of the Groton Hill instrument can overwhelm lesser artists. Each of its 15 sampled organs allows for 999 pre-programmed combinations of hundreds of stops. And Cowan is no set-it-and-forget-it player.
For his opener on the Walcker of Martinkerk Doesburg Rotterdam (which the composer knew), he orchestrated Samuel Prowse Warner’s, stately and sprightly English arrangement of the Overture to Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with 54 almost constantly changing combinations of strings, flutes, brass, donkey hee-haws, and contra bass double-pedal trills, holding our interest as well as our hearts. Click HERE to see the registration schema, and then try to imagine memorizing when to push which button or toe stud while simultaneously playing thousands of notes on the correct manuals!. We hope Cowan can also forget these local facts when he plays his next concert.
Marco Enrico Bossi’s (1861-1925) Ave Maria gradually built up a solid edifice by piling up soft stops while opening and closing three virtual swell boxes. Cowan came up with very unusual associations of voices. For instance, what I imagined to be a mechanical zymbelstern tuned out to be (according to Randy Steere’s research) “a melding of vox angelika and vox celeste with soft flute 8, 4 and soft strings to get that nice sound; he also included both 2nd and 3rd manual tremolos together — It was very effective and he kept changing a string or two in the combination every so often.” Surely he made effective and quite imaginative use of the German Romantic organ style. Later on, some sobbing vox humanas made witty commentary on a Luther hymn; overall the provisioning of so many 8ft. stops over a deep bass felt quite consoling. Bossi’s Giga (not to be confused with Elon’s) playfully charmed. A gorgeous oboe solo came across with fine expression. After toying with us in the softer realms, Giga pressed on with a smooth full organ as we said goodbye to Germany.
Comparing it with what we had just heard, Cowan told us to expect more reed-dominated tone from the Cavaillé-Coll organ in St. Etienne, Caen. Half the number of stops as the earlier Walcker, it was capable of half again the richness of sound. “A French soldier is worth two German soldiers.” A big orchestral oboe, redolent and brightening from the tenor to the treble, sang over purring quiet stops. With great swell box technique and almost note-by-note addition of stops, the purring grew into the voice of a bigger and bigger cat, setting up the raucous roar with claws out for the Final of Vierne’s Symphony No. 3. Cowan sped through pedal scales in octaves faster than most of us could play them with our fingers…the big 16ft. and 32ft. pedal stops growled quite pleasingly. Altogether, the inevitable sounding changes of registration and well-regulated dynamics gave a true symphonic effect of concertante sections.
Hauptwerk’s bright, clear, and occasionally chiffy rendering of the Martinkerk Schnitger brought us into the realm of a standard organ recital, though it must be said that Cowan found plenty of new ways for us to hear Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, the Wedge. The fugue began as somewhat academic, as fugues are wont to be, but as soon as the pedal line entered, we found ourselves in the midst of a silvery, swirling energy field.
In Hereford, hurricanes may hardly ever happen, but one can hardly imagine hearing anything more British than Elgar on the Willis there. Mellow grandeur certainly obtained throughout the two movements we heard from his Sonata in G, Op. 28. The Andante espressivo began with a velvety, sumptuous tremulating gamba solo. A fat gross flute had its say; the snarling of the full organ affirmed in self-importance and then retreated into smothered mutations. Gathered diapasons gave way to soft stuff to close. The Presto (comodo) processed with veddy grand circumstantial pomp.
And yes, from the sublime to the silly, the 4/28 Shea’s Buffalo Wurlitzer rose up on its virtual elevator and responded joyously to Cowan’s jazzy and show-stopping take on Iain Farrington’s (b. 1977) Live Wire with three throbbing tibia ranks, plenty of sizzling strings, a giant vox, maybe the posthorn, and plenty of toy counter items, including crash cymbal, wood blook, piano, xylophone, bells, etc…what did we miss other than the ahooga horn? We were all smiles.
Afterword:
It’s been interesting to hear the evolution of the Hauptwerk instrument over the last three years, as donor-curator Randy Steere continues to voice it. To my ears, the brightness of the upperwork needs to increase by a couple of clicks, and the pedal stops, especially the 16ft. and 32ft. reed, need to honk more. Also, I would suggest re-instituting the noises of the action and keyboard sounds on the antique organs to give more verisimilitude. But all said, the Groton Hill instrument shows tremendous variety from a single console with very deep memory banks. There’s no excuse for performers or audiences to be bored here.
Lee Eiseman is the publisher of the Intelligencer