Paul Jacobs To Perform Horatio Parker's Organ Concerto With Nashville Symphony & Giancarlo Guerrero
By: Julie Musbach Oct. 22, 2019
Grammy-award winning American organist Paul Jacobs appears as soloist in Horatio Parker's renowned Organ Concerto with the Nashville Symphony and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, Thursday evening, November 21, 7:30 pm at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, (One Symphony Place, Nashville, TN 37201). Performances will be repeated at the same venue on Friday evening, November 22, 8 pm and Saturday evening, November 23, 8 pm. The program includes works by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Rachmaninoff. The full program follows:
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Serenade to Music
Horatio Parker: Organ Concerto in E-flat Minor, Op. 55
Sergei Rachmaninoff: The Bells with the National Symphony Chorus
The Parker Organ Concerto will be recorded live on November 23 for the Naxos label. Mr. Jacobs is collaborating twice more this season with Maestro Guerrero. They will be performing Stephen Paulus's Grand Concerto for Organ and Orchestra with the Bamberg Symphony, to be broadcast on Bayerischer Rundfunk Radio in April 2020; they then travel to Wrocław, Poland for a program with the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic Orchestra in May 2020. Maestro Guerrero is a six-time Grammy-award winning conductor now in his 11th season as Music Director of the Nashville Symphony. He is also Music Director of the Wrocław Philharmonic and Principal Guest Conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, Portugal.
A champion of new music for the organ, Mr. Jacobs gave the world premiere of the revised version of Michael Daugherty's Once Upon a Castle for Organ and Orchestra in November 2015 with the Nashville Symphony and Maestro Guerrero; this performance was recorded live for release on the Naxos label and subsequently won a 2017 Grammy Award for Best Classical Compendium. Donald Rosenberg of Gramophone Magazine wrote of the recording: "Hearst's extravagant abode in San Simeon comes to brilliant life in Once Upon a Castle (2015), whose four movements receive an extra sonic kick with the presence of a pipe organ, played to the glowing hilt by Paul Jacobs. Guerrero and the orchestra sound as if they're savouring every fresh Daugherty detail."
Tickets from $24 to $131 are available at: https://tickets.nashvillesymphony.org/6618/6621.
Heralded as "one of the major musicians of our time" by Alex Ross of The New Yorker and as "America's leading organ performer" by The Economist, the internationally celebrated organist Paul Jacobs combines a probing intellect and extraordinary technical mastery with an unusually large repertoire, both old and new. An eloquent champion of his instrument, Mr. Jacobs is known for his imaginative interpretations and charismatic stage presence. He has performed to great critical acclaim on five continents and in each of the fifty United States and is the only organist ever to have won a Grammy Award-in 2011 for Messiaen's towering "Livre du Saint-Sacrément."
No other organist is so frequently re-invited as soloist to perform with prestigious orchestras, thus making him a pioneer in the movement for the revival of symphonic music featuring the organ. Mr. Jacobs regularly appears with the Chicago Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Edmonton Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Montreal Symphony, Nashville Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Pacific Symphony, Phoenix Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Toledo Symphony, and Utah Symphony, among others.
Mr. Jacobs has transfixed audiences, colleagues, and critics alike with landmark performances of the complete works for solo organ by J.S. Bach and Messiaen, as well as works by a vast array of other composers. Mr. Jacobs made musical history at the age of 23 when he played Bach's complete organ works in an 18-hour marathon performance on the 250th anniversary of the composer's death. A fierce advocate of new music, Mr. Jacobs has premiered works by Samuel Adler, Mason Bates, Michael Daugherty, Bernd Richard Deutsch, John Harbison, Wayne Oquin, Stephen Paulus, Christopher Theofanidis, and Christopher Rouse, among others. As a teacher he has also been a vocal proponent of the redeeming nature of traditional and contemporary classical music.
His recital engagements have included performances under the aegis of the American Guild of Organists, Bach Festival Society of Winter Park, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Cleveland Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center White Light Festival, Los Angeles Philharmonic at Disney Hall, Madison Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, Oregon Bach Festival, San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Spivey Hall in Atlanta, and the St. Louis Cathedral-Basilica.
He has given the world premiere of Christopher Rouse's Organ Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra-co-commissioned by the National Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic-and, with the Toledo Symphony, has performed Michael Daugherty's Once Upon a Castle, a work he recorded in 2015 with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra which was released by Naxos in September 2016, and awarded three Grammys, including Best Classical Compendium.
To launch his 2019-2020 season, Mr. Jacobs highlighted the organ on the New York concert scene, performing in a three-recital series for solo organ in September 2019 to critical acclaim. The series gave New Yorkers the rare opportunity to hear this master organist on three important New York instruments: on the Holtkamp organ in the Juilliard School's Paul Recital Hall; the 1933 Aeolian-Skinner "Opus 891" at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin ; and St. Ignatius Loyola's 1993 Mander Organ.
Of his performance of Widor's Toccata, Jay Nordlinger of The New Criterion wrote on September 19, 2019:
"What was it like? Like you, perhaps, I have heard this piece 568 times. Never quite like this. It was bracing, inexorable, heart-stopping (and heart-swelling at the same time). It was a divine delirium. Your bones rattled-literally. (I am talking about physical sensations.) Never have I been more aware of the poverty of a recording, any recording. Paul Jacobs played the Toccata with the stringency, the tenderness, and the élan that the piece requires. (I am taking the technique for granted, which one should not.) Afterward, audience members kept asking one another, "What was that? What was that piece?" Widor, I believe, would have been tickled."
Then Mr. Nordlinger, in The New Criterion "New York Roundup" for the month of October 2019, added:
"What makes Paul Jacobs a great organist? Let me count a few of the ways. He is exceptionally smart. He has superb judgment. He is no-nonsense, not fussing over music or cuting it up. He has fabulous fingers, and feet. His performances are virtually unblemished. He has a keen sense of rhythm, which is important for any musician, but maybe especially so for an organist. He knows how to deal with colors, dynamics-all of it. Let me stress his stringency, that no-nonsense quality. Never will you hear playing less airy-fairy or namby- pamby-yet he is never insensitive, in the least. Sitting in a pew, I thought, 'He is like a Szell of the organ.' If George Szell, the great conductor, had been an organist, he would have played like Paul Jacobs. I cannot render higher praise than that."
George Grella, writing for New York Classical Review (September 18, 2019), had this to say:
Jacobs played the Messe [Messiaen] with a seamless sounding sympathy, gliding through the haunting, spooky passages of isolated timbres and bird calls floating above a cloud of harmonies, at other times playing with such terror and technical skill that the music sounded improvised on the spot. One was again impressed with Jacobs' orchestral choices, which sounded right for the music, including the crystalling descending cadences that sounded like angels gliding down from the heavens."
This season Mr. Jacobs performs Michael Daugherty's Once Upon a Castle with the Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Donald Runnicles and with the Kansas City Symphony and conductor Jason Seber. With the Utah Symphony and conductor Thierry Fischer, Mr. Jacobs plays Barber's Toccata Festiva and Handel's Organ Concerto No. 13 in F Major, "Cuckoo & the Nightingale," in April 2020. And in May, Mr. Jacobs will inaugurate the newly restored Hazel Wright organ at the Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, as part of the opening festivities under the aegis of the American Guild of Organists Orange County Chapter and the Catholic Diocese of Orange County.
Additional recitals during the 2019-20 season include appearances under the auspices of the San Francisco Symphony, Chelsea Opera, Furman State University, SUNY Potsdam, Clayton State University, Joyce at Aiken, Dallas's Highland Park United Methodist Church, and Bethlehem Music Series. Mr. Jacobs continues ase was appointed Director of the asjdfk Director of the Oregon Bach Festival Organ Institute, a position he assumed in the summer of 2014. Soon to be released will be Barber's Toccata Festiva with the Lucerne Symphony and conductor James Gaffigan on the Harmonia Mundi label. Mr. Jacobs will close out his 2019-2020 season on June 17, 2020, with a Paris recital at the Maison de la Radio, presented by Radio France and the Orchestre National de France, to be broadcast live from the station's headquarters. The program will include a world premiere of a new work written for Mr. Jacobs by the French composer Jean-Baptiste Robin.
Marking an important milestone for the development of organ playing in Asia, Mr. Jacobs participated in the 2017 launch of China's first International Organ Competition-in Shanghai-when he was appointed to serve as president of the competition's jury. After another successful guest engagement with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Philadelphia's Verizon Hall performing both Oquin's Resilience, for organ and orchestra, and James MacMillan's A Scotch Bestiary, Mr. Jacobs was invited by Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin to tour three major European cities with the Philadelphia Orchestra in May 2018. He played the Oquin work in Brussels, Luxembourg, and in Hamburg's recently inaugurated Elbphilharmonie.
Mr. Jacobs' performance in Lincoln Center's White Light Festival with soprano Christine Brewer received a glowing review from Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim of The New York Times:
"Seated at the console was the organist Paul Jacobs, a virtuoso of dazzling technical acumen, who anchored this recital of devotional music as part of the Lincoln Center White Light Festival. [...] Mr. Jacobs showed off his mastery in a handful of solo selections by Bach, Reger, Charles-Marie Widor and Nadia Boulanger, Lili's sister. In Reger's Toccata and Fugue, he built up a wonderfully organic crescendo in which the music expanded in all dimensions - brightness, clarity and volume - until it filled the room with a pulsating, radiant cloud of sound." --November 3, 2015, The New York Times
Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Brewer recorded a CD for Naxos entitled Divine Redeemer, featuring works by Bach, Handel, Franck, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Puccini, Gounod, and Reger.
Prodigiously talented from his earliest years, at 15 young Jacobs was appointed head organist of a parish of 3,500 in his hometown, Washington, Pennsylvania. He has performed the complete organ works of Olivier Messiaen in mara- thon performances throughout North America. In addition to his highly esteemed recordings of Messiaen and Daugherty on Naxos, Mr. Jacobs has recorded organ concertos by Lou Harrison and Aaron Copland with the San Francisco Symphony and Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas on the orchestra's own label, SFS Media.
Mr. Jacobs studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, double-majoring with John Weaver for organ and Lionel Party for harpsichord, and at Yale University with Thomas Murray. He joined the faculty of The Juilliard School in 2003 and was named chairman of the organ department in 2004, one of the youngest faculty appointees in the school's history. He received Juilliard's prestigious William Schuman Scholar's Chair in 2007. In addition to his concert and teaching appearances, Mr. Jacobs is a frequent performer at festivals across the world, and has appeared on American Public Media's Performance Today, Pipedreams, and Saint Paul Sunday, as well as NPR's Morning Edition, ABC-TV's World News Tonight, and BBC Radio 3. In 2017 he received an honorary doctorate from Washington and Jefferson College.
Comments
Videos