All Episodes

Famous also for his superb improvisations and exacting teaching methods, today we remember him through his compositions. This week’s show explores fourteen virtuosic and poetic movements from the pen of French wizard Marcel Dupré. We’ll hear the three Preludes & Fugues of Opus 7 that set the world afire when he was but 26, four of his Opus 50 Inventions, ironic miniatures, concise as an Oriental haiku, and the Seven Pieces which he wrote during his tours in the 1920s and dedicated to friends he made along the way. In his twenties he astonished the world with virtuosity, by his thirties he’d amazed us with his depth, and throughout his career we regarded him as the best there was. The great man himself teams up with his former students and advocates in a musical offering of Seven Pieces, times two.

It’s not every day that Bach’s Royal Instrument gets up and jigs, but in this week’s show the rambunctious rhythms will make very difficult for you to sit still. Whether from an Italian Renaissance chapel or a Baptist Church in Ohio, our music includes everything from Pavans to Rumbas. The music is so enlivening that two of the instruments actually play themselves. Don’t be a wallflower. Groove to Cuban rhythms, an English Bolero, a Viennese Rumba and many other exciting and exotic examples of why your ideas about the pipe organ may need updating. Put on your dancing shoes and join us on the floor!

This week is all about Music in Monasteries as we revel in the glorious sonorities of instruments old and new in abbey churches and convent chapels. Whether playing a Little Oboe Concerto at southern Germany, moderating a solemn mass in Provence, or celebrating new wine on the Indiana plains, these instruments resound in equal measure for prayer AND praise. Worship and the arts come together at Saint Meinrad, Indiana, Saint Maximin, Provence, and half a dozen other destinations where organ music enhances the life experience with beauty, grace and power. Hear works from four centuries as our tour bus takes us on the rounds, fueled by Abbey Gas.

Music for organ and orchestra enjoys an added spice at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. This week we visit the recent 44-stop Casavant pipe organ to evaluate its considerable potential. Consultant Jeff Weiler talks about its varied background and why, despite a modest specification, it does everything an organ must do in a symphonic space. Soloist David Schrader plays colorful solos and teams up with the Grant Park Symphony for works by Samuel Barber, Walter Piston, Leo Sowerby and Michael Colgrass. American concert halls have come to realize that the room is not complete without the presence of the King of Instruments. Understand why and join in a Chicago Celebration: the Casavant organ at Orchestra Hall.

with slideshow, interviews, restored organs of Oaxaca and more! This week we expand our sense of music’s North American history when we visit the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca to hear pipe organs from the 17th and 18th centuries. While we were barely ‘the colonies’ up north, Mexican natives directed by Spanish artisans practiced the art of organbuilding as early as fifty years following the landing of Columbus. With a refreshing and colorful spirit, instruments in the village of Tlacochahuaya, La Soledad Basilica and the Oaxaca Cathedral illuminate the stories of organists Elisa Freixo, Cristina Garcia Banegas and Roberto Fresco. This is a precious heritage, deserving our careful attention and enthusiastic support. Join us south of the border for a Oaxacan Holiday.

Bold and beautiful sounds from recently inaugurated American-built instruments will engage our ears on this week’s show. Robert Bates plays at Holy Rosary Church in Portland, and John Obetz visits with the Benedictines at Conception Abbey in Missouri. You’ll also hear instruments at West Market Street Methodist in Greensboro, North Carolina, Northridge Presbyterian in Dallas, Texas, and the Community Church in Glenview, Illinois. We’re on the road again with a cross-country sampler of recent American-built instruments, proving that this time-honored art is alive and well as practiced in our United States. Enter into the festivities and concert performances in a series of Debuts and Dedications.

The colors may be noteworthy, but the lengthening of days spells a change of season. This week we’ll steady ourselves against fall, with several musical impressions of summer’s end. Clarence Mader penned an October Interlude, Joseph Bonnet wrote several Autumn Poems, and Antonio Vivaldi takes us on a fox hunt through the crisp countryside. Walt Strony and Lyn Larsen play some seasonal pops favorites, and Kurt Luedders, Cherry Rhodes and Graham Barber lead us in a pageant of color. When the short sleeved shirt gets replaced by a jacket and scarf, you know that summer is behind us and a new season awaits. Enjoy music which embraces the best of fall and join us as we reflect on the multiplicity of colors in Autumn Leaves.

When you’ve got it, flaunt it. As a center for trade and diplomacy, the seventeenth-century north German port of Hamburg was one of the most prosperous independent cultural centers of Europe. As a city, it supported composers like Scheidemann, Praetorius and Reincken who, in turn, provided the foundations of a German Baroque style. This week, we sample the musical life of this cosmopolitan Hanseatic center and hear some of the music and instruments for which the city was, and remains, famous. Guy Bovet, Douglas Bush, Gustav Leonhardt and Julia Brown play upon a proud cultural tradition, and we serve up delectible samples from our Hamburger Hotdish.

A good tune is a joy forever, but instead of repeating the same melody over and over, why not make it different? This week’s show illustrates the art of variation. Organist, Hannes Meyer toys with a European folksong, while the late, great George Thalben-Ball takes the ferocious fiddling of Paganini and transforms it into a virtuosic dance on the organ pedals. Secular or sacred, sumptuous or sometimes just plain silly, our themes provide remarkable opportunity for creative possibilities. It’s all about the altered intent, where one good tune demands another take. By the end, even you’ll be calling out, Play it Again, Sam.

This week’s broadcast is a meditation on that ever necessary, always powerful, inscrutible yet marvelous energy we call love. The choir of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, sings of the love of God for humankind. Bach and his favored pupil Krebs lovingly decorate Lutheran hymns based on themes of loving kindness. Virgil Fox plays of love’s dream, and other composers explore the range of love as evidenced in folk songs, oratorios and operas. It is a wondrous thing, a power that transports us beyond the mundane and opens new worlds of expression and experience. From folk tunes and hymns, art song and opera, our performers draw upon upon rich resource of music to sooth the soul.

It’s organ and orchestra on our next Pipedreams program, from the inaugural week’s concerts at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall where the Watjen Concert Organ, built by C.B. Fisk, made its debut with Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle symphony during the Millennial Year National Convention of the American Guild of Organists. Hatsumi Miura premiere’s Robert Sirota’s new piece, In the Fullness of Time, resident curator Carole Terry performs Aaron Copland’s path-breaking Symphony Number 1, and Marie-Bernadette Dufourcet-Hakim introduces the vibrant Seattle Concerto by her husband, Naji Hakim. The crowds at Benaroya Hall went wild, and you will, too, as we share in Seattle’s Pride, America’s newest concert organ, this week on Pipedreams. There’s unrepentant optimism in the new Seattle Concerto by Naji Hakim, and a world of expressive possibility in music by Copland and Robert Sirota featuring the potent Watjen Concert Organ recently inaugurated at Benaroya Hall by Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony. It’s Seattle’s Pride this week on Pipedreams.

Further forays into repertoire for the organ “augmented”, in this case by brasses, strings, winds, and electronics.

Recitalist Herman D. Taylor provides perceptive introductions to varied works of African-American composers.

Sounds from the past, featuring 19th and early 20th century instruments between Milwaukee and Madison, played during a national convention of the Organ Historical Society.

On this week’s show, we’ll assess the not inconsiderable accomplishments of three talented offspring who made their own way in the world of music. Wilhelm Friedemann was considered Germany’s foremost organist. Johann Christian converted to Catholicism, studied in Italy, and ended up as the most celebrated import, after Handel, on the London scene. And Carl Philip Emmanuel, after a period of royal servitude, became music director for the city of Hamburg, a job his father lusted after but never himself achieved. Boys will be boys, but when your father is Johann Sebastian Bach there are certain standards to be met, and a degree of individual independence to be sought. Hear the the works of three talented offspring the Sons of ‘B’ music by The Bach Boys, this week on PIPEDREAMS.

We’ve scanned the continent for interesting sounds and have visited churches in California, Massachusetts and Illinois in search of exciting pipe organ installations. Among the choice morsels gathered include John Butt playing Spanish repertoire at the University of California, Berkeley; and Loraine Olson Waters exploring mostly French pieces at the little Mont Marie Chapel in Holyoke. George Edward Damp will also entertain us with english fancies at Saint John the Divine Chapel in Champaign, and Louis Patterson savors romantic moments at Grace Lutheran Church, River Forest. The repertoire’s international and historic, but the instruments all were made in the USA. An array of artists celebrate the diverse organs built by American organbuilders Berghaus, Buzard, Harrold and Watersmith.

We step out in a colorful procession in this week’s show by parading select works by American composers. You’ll hear everything from dances to gospel preludes. William Bolcom, Robert Elmore, Howard Hanson, Emma Lou Diemer and Leo Sowerby are just a few of the musicians represented, with works recorded in concert settings in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Rochester, NY, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Our promenade builds from subtlety to strength. If you’ve considered the organ an old-world instrument, think again and join us for a celebration of new world sounds, a virtual Pageant.

On our next Pipedreams program, Wilma Jensen is featured artist, proving that Nashville is not ALL country music. On the Casavant organ at Saint George’s Church, Ms. Jensen plays a recital on churchly themes, from bright preludes and quiet meditations to scenes of the Passion and hymns of the Resurrection. It IS all about love, and dedication, to music for the organ and the church. We celebrate the career of one of Nashville’s unsung star performers, a little woman who can make the big Casavant organ speak its mind. Enjoy the artistry of Wilma Jensen at Saint George’s Church, Nashville, TN.