Cameron Carpenter debuts his International Touring Organ in two concerts at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall on March 9, 2014. The unveiling concert at 2pm is followed by a dedication concert at 7pm, tickets $35–$200. ($100 and $200 ticketholders have access to additional private events and a champagne reception.) The concerts, each with different programs, feature music by Bach, Bernstein, Demessieux, Dupré, Scriabin, Vaughan Williams and many others, including the world premiere performance of Cameron’s Music For An Imaginary Film (2013).
Carpenter maintains that a great organist, like any other great musician, should have a personal instrument upon which to perform consistently anywhere in the world. The project to make a mobile digital organ artistically and sonically equal to any of the world’s great organs has taken nearly ten years, the emergence of maverick organbuilders Marshall & Ogletree LLC, and a historic cooperation between two of the world’s prominent musical managements (CAMI Music LLC and Konzertdirektion Schmid) to complete.
The touring organ’s launch, beginning with its March 9 Lincoln Center premiere, continues with the worldwide release on April 22nd of Cameron’s Sony Classical debut album If You Could Read My Mind. The CD/DVD album features Cameron playing the ITO in music by Scriabin, Bach, Dupré, Rachmaninoff, Piazzolla, Liszt and others; a cycle of paraphrases on songs by Gordon Lightfoot, Patsy Cline, Leonard Cohen, Burt Bacharach and Leslie Bricusse; and the world premiere recording of Cameron’s own Music For An Imaginary Film (2013).
The making of the International Touring Organ, as well as the making of the artist behind it, receive an in-depth examination in the upcoming Boomtown Media documentary feature film The Sound Of My Life, by director Thomas Grube (Rhythm is It, The Asian Journey). An exclusive 40-minute private concert directed and edited by Grube will be featured as the DVD component of the Sony album.
The debut of the International Touring Organ represents a historic shift in the perception of the digital organ, as it is a radical first for any organist to prefer a digital organ to the pipe organ for live performance and recording. The recording of If You Could Read My Mind at Methuen Memorial Music Hall, and the launch of the organ at Alice Tully Hall, both halls with important pipe organs, is one example of this preference. While the idea is controversial and even considered dubious by many in the organ community, Carpenter is adamant about its musical worth.
“My vision is to keep the best of the classical organ—its emotional magnitude, its sonic range, its coloristic drama—but to liberate these from the pipe organ’s immobility, its moving parts, its cost, its institutionality,” he adds. “I want the ‘American Classic’ cathedral organ to combine with its counterpart, the cinema organ, in a single instrument—the cathedral organ’s expansiveness, and the Wurlitzer’s rapidity and audacity. It will be ethereal and rhythmless at times, and at other times more rhythmically intense than any pipe organ in the world.”
Cameron Carpenter is represented by CAMI Music LLC (http://www.camimusic.com/) in North America and Asia, and Konzertdirection Schmid ((http://www.kdschmid.de/) in Europe, UK/Nordic/AU/NZ and Russia. He records exclusively for Sony Classical.
For information: www.cameroncarpenter.com
Photo: Cameron Carpenter with tour organ; photo credit Thomas Grube
