By Jay Fluellen and John Walthausen
The first-ever Philadelphia Organ Festival highlighted incredible instruments, presented compelling music, and introduced Philadelphians to unique architectural treasures in a city replete with sacred places. Over the course of eight concerts in seven days, from March 15 to 22, 2024, Philadelphians heard remarkable music in the following venues: Girard College, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church Germantown, the First Presbyterian Church of Germantown, Tindley Temple (United Methodist), Temple Rodeph Shalom, the Unitarian Society of Germantown, Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral, and Longwood Gardens. Each venue featured a magnificent pipe organ that many concertgoers heard for the first time. Some had driven past the concert locations countless times but had never been inside. Throughout the festival week, many attendees came to multiple concerts, discovering some of Philadelphia’s architectural wonders alongside high-quality and innovative programming.
Opening Night at Girard College Chapel.
A primary aim in the programming was to feature some of Philadelphia’s most singular organs in conversation with other instruments, with film, with unexpected repertoire, and with historic buildings around the city. Philadelphia is rightly famous for its many symphonic organs from the first half of the 20th century, and four of these were heard in very different programs. For the opening-night concert on the famed E. M. Skinner organ of Girard College Chapel, Chelsea Chen teamed up with a brass ensemble in a program with approachable music, featuring transcriptions from Bach chorales and an arrangement of the finale from Camille Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony. A special treat on the program was an arrangement of Ravel’s Boléro for organ, percussion, and ten brass players that delivered singular color and bombast in the impressive trapezoidal chapel building – whose organ is placed above the ceiling!
Later in the opening weekend, the festival held a concert at Tindley Temple, one of Philadelphia’s most storied African American congregations. This church, founded by Dr. Charles Albert Tindley, a father of gospel music, houses a four-manual symphonic organ from M. P. Möller that is both monumental and exceptionally well preserved. Together with singers from the Marian Anderson Society, Curtis Institute of Music professor Alan Morrison paid tribute to the famous contralto and civil rights pioneer Marian Anderson, drawing inspiration from several recitals she performed in this church at the height of her career.
Concert at Longwood Gardens.
On the vintage Whitelegg-Möller organ of the Episcopal Cathedral, recently moved from another church and installed at the cathedral by Emery Brothers, Daryl Robinson brought a program of exciting contemporary music alongside his own fresh transcription of Holst’s The Planets for organ and percussion ensemble. In this church, the ensemble was positioned at the front of the nave, allowing the audience to see the full team of musicians at work. For the final concert, Organ Festival attendees traveled outside city limits to hear the unusual organ at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square. This instrument, the largest ever built by the Aeolian Organ Company, is full of unusual colors, including numerous percussion stops. Alcée Chriss III made the organ sparkle in an intimate program featuring his own arrangements of Rachmaninoff and Guilmant alongside lighter fare, such as a Hollywood-inspired arrangement of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
For many, the organ and the music of Bach are inseparable, and the festival also offered a program featuring a complete cantata of Bach at the Unitarian Society in Germantown. Supported by four vocalists and eight instrumentalists, John Walthausen presented cantata BWV 146, much as it would have been done in Bach’s day: with musicians playing in the tight space of an organ loft amid all the colors of a large organ. The Unitarian Society’s building is an unusual architectural delight, decorated in the Beaux Arts Style, and its organ, built in Germany by Rieger Orgelbau, was inspired by the organ reform movement, which sought to recover some of the sonic ideals of the baroque period.
The Passion of Joan of Arc showing.
Contemporary music also had an important place in the festival. At the First Presbyterian Church in Germantown, Amanda Renée Mole offered a program celebrating minimalist music, including works of living composers Arvo Pärt, Ad Wammes, and Nico Muhly. For the finale of her performance, she was joined by a team of percussionists playing marimbas, glockenspiel, and vibraphones, as well as three singers from The Crossing in a rare performance of Steve Reich’s Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ. Earlier that day, at St. Luke’s Germantown, Matthew Glandorf created an entirely improvised score to the early silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. In this concert, Glandorf found resonances not only with the film but with the brilliant neo-Gothic interior of this historic building. At Temple Rodeph Shalom, the festival presented the American premiere of an experimental work, Garras de Oro (Claws of Gold), scored to the Colombian silent film of the same name by Juan Pablo Carreño for organ and amplified ensemble, showing the ability of the organ to integrate in a cutting-edge work of contemporary art.
Philadelphia is a true city of neighborhoods, each unique and offering room for unlimited discovery. This festival embraced the possibility of experiencing Philadelphia in a fresh way, seeing its sacred places differently, and hearing new artists, a new repertoire, and new ideas.
