Organist Paul Jacobs
A gifted orchestrator, fleet of foot and hand
October 8, 2009Even for those (like me) in the audience who wouldn’t know a diapason from a dipstick, Paul Jacobs’s organ recital on Oct. 6 sounded mighty spiffy.
Jacobs is the absurdly young (32) head of the organ department at the Juilliard School in New York. He opened the Tuesday Musical Club’s artist series in Laurel Heights United Methodist Church, a new venue this season for the venerable group.
Jacobs’s program included music by Robert Schumann, W.A. Mozart, Franz Liszt and the brilliant American organist and composer Leo Sowerby.
As in any organ recital, however, the music was not solely by the respective composers, but also by the performer, who necessarily must orchestrate each work -- and orchestrate it anew every time he plays it on a different organ.
Impressive as he was for the fluidity of his technique, the flexibility of his phrasing and the astonishing virtuosity of his pedal work, the most memorable aspect of Jacobs’s recital was his imaginative and always appropriate choices of registration -- the assignment of specific bits of the score to specific stops, each with its own timbre.
He had a substantial (but not huge) range of options at his disposal. The church’s 61-rank, 49-stop instrument was built in 1992 by the Redman Organ Co. of Fort Worth, though some of the pipework was salvaged and revoiced from the church’s previous Aeolian-Skinner organ. One limitation: The absence of a 32-foot stop for a bone-rattling bottom octave.
The evening’s main event was Liszt’s epic Fantasy and Fugue on “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam,” a theme taken from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera “Le prophète.” Running about 26 minutes in this performance, the piece is practically an opera all by itself -- or became so in Jacobs’s scenographic approach. His registrations, which changed subtly or radically with great frequency, did not just clarify musical structure and shifts in emotional weight, but were cinematic, seeming to suggest a close-up here, a long shot there, an intimate room or a vast battlefield, even changes in lighting. Registrations aside, the fellow could play up a storm. The fugue attained a deliciously manic, even demonic, peak.
Jacobs brought comparable excitement to Schumann’s brilliant Fugue on B-A-C-H. There, and in the more muted Sketch in F Minor and Canon in A-flat, Jacobs seemed to take his coloristic cues from Schumann’s own use of the orchestra.
In Mozart’s strangely structured Fantasia in F Minor, Jacobs brought wonderfully flexible shaping to the ruminative slow sections that flank the cheery center.
Sowerby composed his “Pageant” for Vatican organist Fernando Germani, and the furious, highly rhythmic pedal solo that opens the work was clearly intended only for the most virtuosic soloists -- a category that includes Jacobs. The main body of the piece is a set of enterprising variations on a plainspoken theme that seemed rooted in Sowerby’s American Midwest.
The only quibble to be lodged against the recital was Jacobs’s excessive (to my ears) opening and closing of the swell shutters in the encore, a Bach fugue.
Mike
Greenberg
