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A ‘Virtual’ Organ Wins New Converts at a Recital

By ALLAN KOZINN/The New York Times
Published: July 7, 2007

When the Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ at Trinity Church was damaged by dust and debris from the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the church dismantled the instrument and planned to either restore or replace it. For the short term, the church installed a “virtual pipe organ” that uses digital samples of real pipe organ timbres, played through a computerized audio system and nearly 100 speakers hidden behind dummy pipes.

To organ purists who have had epochal debates about whether organs with electronic keyboards can equal the more time-honored pneumatic action, and to organ agnostics who simply have a soft spot for traditional instruments in historic settings, the notion of replacing Trinity’s Aeolian-Skinner with a “virtual” instrument was a horrifying sign of the times.

But the digital organ, built by Marshall & Ogletree, has had a thorough workout since it was installed in 2003, and its performance has persuaded the church’s music office, as well as a good number of visiting organists, that it is worthy of its setting. Trinity has now decided to make the Marshall & Ogletree its permanent organ, and to commission a second for St. Paul’s Chapel. On Tuesday, the church announced that it would sell off the parts of the lamented Aeolian-Skinner.

If the decision was controversial, you wouldn’t have known it on Thursday afternoon, when Cameron Carpenter opened the church’s Conservatory Stars Organ Festival. The church was filled to capacity, mostly with organists in New York for the regional convention of the American Guild of Organists and the national convention of the American Theater Organ Society. Both halves of Mr. Carpenter’s recital drew standing ovations.

In a program split between organ classics and audacious arrangements of piano works, orchestral scores, film music and pop songs, Mr. Carpenter showed that the digital organ can produce the grand sound of a pipe organ, from the crystalline, flutey treble sounds through a robustly reedy and brassy midrange right down to floor-shaking basses. He also showed a way in which the digital organ was superior: added to the 170 stops normally available on the Trinity organ were another 125 theater-organ stops. Nearly doubling an organ’s available timbres by adding software is a feat a pipe organ can’t match.

Mr. Carpenter’s performance was as flashy and virtuosic as the occasion demanded. He began with his own transcription of Chopin’s “Revolutionary” Étude, in which the speedy chromatic runs were all in the pedals. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in G (BWV 541), though more conventionally executed, was scarcely less energetic, and Franck’s “Pièce Héroïque” has rarely sounded so thoroughly visceral. It wasn’t until his own “Love Song No. 1” that Mr. Carpenter showed he had an introspective side as well.

That was displayed only fleetingly. His performance of Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz No. 1” magnified the music’s inherent thunder and drama. For some of the pop works, including John Williams’s “Raiders March,” Duke Ellington’s “Solitude” and Django Reinhardt’s “Mystery Pacific,” Mr. Carpenter drew freely on stops that approximated percussion, bells and celesta, amid more robust timbres. He closed his program with an improvisation that wove together the melodies of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday,” Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Cyndi Lauper hit “True Colors.”

The Conservatory Stars Organ Festival runs on Thursdays through Aug. 9 at Trinity Church, Broadway at Wall Street, Lower Manhattan, (212) 602-0800. The next recital, on July 12, is by Nathan Laube.