Pity the poor pipe organ. The behemoth instruments are often thought of as fusty relics of classical music — heard only in churches, vintage horror movies and increasingly fewer baseball stadiums. But British keyboardist James McVinnie wants you to hear the pipe organ in fresh new ways.
The approach he takes on his new album Dreamcatcher is to offer striking compositions by today's composers. Like McVinnie, Nico Muhly is in his early 40s, and his four-movement Patterns receives its debut recording here in a sparkling performance. The opening and closing sections are perpetual motion workouts, filled with scurrying, minimalist-suffused figures and rumbling belches in the lower register.
Beside agile fingers and fleet feet for pedals, pipe organ playing is broadly about registration — the fine art of capturing unique sonorities by choosing the right combination of pipes. And intriguing registration is what gives Dreamcatcher its distinctive flavor. Terrific examples are almost everywhere you look, especially in Riff-raff, a whimsical piece by Giles Swayne that, as they say, "pulls out all the stops." Even peculiar ones that croak, tinkle and whir like the soundtrack to a B-grade science fiction movie.
Riff-raff was composed for the instrument heard on this album, the grand organ at St. Albans Cathedral, north of London. That's where McVinnie served as an organist in his teens, establishing a relationship with the instrument, and it's where he returned to record this album. (A rich history exists of long-standing relationships between organists and their instruments. Olivier Messiaen played at the same church in Paris for over six decades.) The instrument at St. Albans boasts 4,500 pipes — plenty to give anachronistic heft to Riff-raff's amusing boogie-woogie passage.
One can't live on organ music alone, which is why McVinnie includes contemporary piano pieces on the album. There's the oddly titled Imaginary Pancake by Gabriella Smith, a young composer on the rise from California. The music, which offers an abundance of delicious pounding, is obsessed with the two extremes of the keyboard — arms are outstretched to the lowest and highest keys.
As a pianist, McVinnie has an organist's ear for color. In China Gates, an early work by John Adams, the constant, yet gentle, San Francisco rain that inspired the composer is rendered in crystalline detail as McVinnie spotlights the descending droplets.
Adams is one of nine living composers on the album, which features works by Meredith Monk, Marcos Balter (his politically charged Dreamcatcher lends the album its title), newcomer inti figgis-vizueta, Bryce Dessner of The National and Laurie Spiegel, a pioneering electronic composer. Spiegel's piece, The Unquestioned Answer, (originally recorded in the 1970s on a computer-based hybrid instrument designed by Bell Labs) gets a pipe organ makeover by McVinnie, who is fascinated by the connections between his instrument and its high-tech descendant, the synthesizer. Here, the droning and tolling sound of the pipe organ becomes a dazzling stand-in for modern electronics.
McVinnie's Dreamcatcher is a smartly curated album, where a thoughtful artist challenges us — with extraordinary results — to think of the pipe organ as an instrument of our time.
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