On Friday and Saturday, American bad-boy organist Cameron Carpenter joins the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and music director Edwin Outwater at the Centre in the Square before travelling east for a Sunday concert at Koerner Hall. Controversy and scandal are sure to follow.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
The right spelling is Scandal, with a capital S, actually.
That’s the title of a two-year-old organ concerto by Carpenter that depicts in music the breaking of nasty gossip about a celebrity, a crescendo of disbelief and anger, and a climactic confession (in the form of a solo cadenza) that subsides into a form of acceptance.
This is but one of many pieces of music — most of them for solo organ — Carpenter has composed for himself and whoever else can approach his spectacular technique at the most complex of keyboard instruments. The organist, who turns 32 this year, treats the pipe organ like his personal sandbox.
The thing is, he seems to need more than sand to keep him happy.
A sort of restless spirit, he needs to tinker with everything — and that includes the music on this week’s programme.
At the Centre in the Square, Carpenter will play two of J.S. Bach’s best-known pieces for organ, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565), written by Bach when he was in his 20s.
“They requested it for the programme, probably because so many people know it,” says the organist of the pair of showstoppers. But he can’t play it straight. “I’ve incorporated the piano transcriptions by people like Busoni and Grainger and the orchestrations of people like Henry Wood,” he states.
This means that Carpenter has tinkered with the textures and colours. He justifies this two ways. The first is by saying that his tinkering acknowledges the way in which these pieces became popular — not by being heard in churches, but being performed by pianists and orchestras on the radio and on disc in the early days of recording.
“What we should do is to return to the organ all the extra stuff it picked up along the way,” Carpenter explains. “I include it and summarize it in my playing — it’s a sort of vertical integration, and it’s great fun.”
The organist’s goal is to shake up his listeners a bit. Like so many pieces from the Classical Hit List, the Toccata and Fugue, “are something we think we know,” Carpenter underlines. “And that always turns by red lights on.”
Most organists look askance at this sort of thing. They look for the original manuscripts (if they exist — and they don’t in the case of these Bach pieces). They consult critical editions. They absorb the performance history. Then they craft something they believe honestly acknowledges these building blocks.
Carpenter, on the other hand, is off on his own path — one filled with interesting and unusual sights and sounds.
The organist’s tinkering extends to the instrument itself.
Carpenter has spent the better part of his adult life complaining about the shortcomings of traditional pipe organs — about how temperamental they are and how unresponsive their keyboards can sometimes be — and touting the virtues of digital technology.
He has been putting his money where his mouth is, using the handsome fees from his worldwide concertizing to fund the development of a sophisticated digital instrument that he is sure will reproduce the sounds of the finest historical organs without the maintenance issues — and also be portable.
Carpenter hopes the long-gestated instrument will be finished this summer. He says the process has been an epic saga in and of itself — one that has been followed by a documentary filmmaker — and will be far from boring when he is finally ready to tell the tale.
Neither the Centre in the Square nor Koerner Hall have their own organs, so, in the absence of Carpenter’s dream instrument, the audience will see and hear him perform on a digital organ made by one of the tried-and-true American manufacturers, Rodgers.
The Centre in the Square programme is divided between orchestra and organ, and includes Anton Webern’s magnificent orchestral re-imagining of Ricercare No. 2 from Bach’s Musical Offering, Bach’s orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068, and Aaron Copland’s jazzy Music for Theatre suite alongside Carpenter’s concerto, The Scandal, and the Toccata & Fugue. (Details here.)
The Koerner Hall concert on Sunday afternoon opens with the Copland suite and Carpenter’s Scandal. The second half of the programme is all Carpenter’s, which he we make up on the fly. (Details here.)
Although it may be a mystery, it comes with the organist’s trademark rhinestone-encrusted guarantee that it won’t be boring or predictable.
As with real life scandal and controversy, it’s hard not to be transfixed by what’s going on, and that’s exactly what Carpenter wants. His Master Plan, after all, is to hook people who would not otherwise listen to the pipe organ — and that’s the vast majority of the population — on its multi-coloured charms.
Here’s a snippet of Carpenter that pretty much captures everything he is about, produced by the people at the Sydney Opera House last year, followed by a promotional video just made by Carpenter and Kitchener-Waterloo music director Edwin Outwater:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
