Jan Kraybill: The Orchestral Organ
Reference Recordings

During the 1800s, significant advances in organ design enabled organists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce transcriptions of orchestral pieces that could legitimately claim to rival their counterparts in tone colour and detail. To be sure, the transcription wasn't conceived as a replacement for the original but rather as a means by which to experience it differently and hear it with fresh ears. On The Orchestral Organ, Dr. Jan Kraybill performs organ transcriptions of material by Sibelius, Holst, Wagner, Verdi, Barber, and others, and while many of the works are familiar, they assume vivid new life when presented in this organ-only context.

It's not just any organ, either: on the seventy-four-minute release, Kraybill, Organ Conservator at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, and Organist-in-Residence at the international headquarters of Community of Christ in Independence, Missouri, performs the eleven pieces using the Julia Irene Kauffman Casavant Organ at the Kauffman Center's Helzberg Hall. The parts for the pipe organ were produced at the Casavant Frères workshop in Quebec and then transported to Kansas City, where four months of installation and testing were required before the organ, which boasts four keyboards for hands and one for feet, seventy-nine stops, and102 ranks (of its 5,548 pipes, the biggest is thirty-two feet tall, the smallest the size of a pencil), could be deemed ready. The multiple keyboards, of course, allow the organist to generate a huge range of textures, including contrapuntal and homophonic.

Adding to the release's appeal, the pieces by Tchaikovsky, Holst, and Wagner are premiere recordings of the organ transcriptions, and Emil von Reznícek's is a world premiere. Representative of the album are the treatments of Barber's Adagio for Strings and Sibelius's Finlandia; being so well-known, they offer case studies for how effectively the transcriptions enable the listener to experience familiar material in a new way. In its 1949-published transcription, Barber's best-known piece retains all of the ceremonial grandeur and pathos for which it's become famous, and the power the Helzberg Hall organ's capable of generating is effectively shown in the declamatory chords that appear after the methodically winding ascent that climaxes two-thirds of the way in. Of course, with the piece known for its strings scoring rather than full orchestra (more precisely, it first appeared as the second movement in Barber's String Quartet, Op. 11, after which Toscanini conducted the string orchestra version during a 1938 radio broadcast), Barber's setting allows perhaps for a more seamless translation than others on the release. The 1907 transcription of Sibelius's 1900 tone poem retains the drama and robustness of the original, and the stately, hymn-like closing section exudes all the poignancy of a strong orchestral performance.

Tchaikovsky's Coronation March, which grew out of a commission to write a grand ceremonial march and a cantata to grace the coronation of Tsar Alexandr III (1845-1894), is as declamatory and spirited as one would expect, the organ, with its ample resources of colour and contrast, again proving itself an ideal vehicle for the music's expression. A march of a slightly different kind is heard in the 1884 transcription of Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette, a macabre yet lighthearted romp the Faust composer wrote in 1872 and which later became famously known as the musical material used in Alfred Hitchcock's television show. One final march concludes the recording, an 1885 transcription of Verdi's “Grand March” from Aïda, which premiered fourteen years earlier. The piece, which appears in Act II when the Egyptian warrior Rhadames returns to Thebes after his victory over the Ethiopians, is suitably triumphant in tone, the organ in this instance evoking the sound of trumpets and the magnificent spectacle of chariots, banners, and elephants.

In being based on medieval English carols, Holst's “Chaconne” from his three-movement Suite No.1 in E-flat Major, for Military Band (1909) lends itself superbly to an organ treatment, the transcription of the work's opening part in this case published in 1933 and recorded for the first time by Kraybill. Much the same could be said of the 1911 rendering of Wagner's “Forest Murmurs” from Siegfried, which shows the organ's capacity for tone painting and its ability to evoke the sounds of birds chirping and a rustling forest. Also included on the release are performances of a 1922-published treatment of Saint-Saëns' stirring “Romance” from his Orchestral Suite in D, Op.49 and an 1885 transcription of Mendelssohn's sprightly “Scherzo” from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

July 2019