Midnight Organ Recital Pedals Through 'Potter'

Picture your favorite old, black and white horror movie: the innocent young girl is apprehensively peering around the corner or creeping up the creaky staircase; shadows flit across the wall; a door slams shut; just when you least expect it, Dracula jumps out and grabs our terrified heroine, complete with a big, climactic organ swell! Now would the scene have been at all frightening without those cacophonous organ notes? Certainly not.

Maybe the Harvard Organ Society didn’t have such dramatic ideas behind their midnight Halloween concert, but nine performers explored the spookier side of the instrument late Tuesday evening.

The Society put on the show for a modest crowd, some costumed, in Memorial Church. The church lights were dimmed and a screen erected on the altar so the audience could see the performers at work.

Edward Jones, the Gund University organist and choirmaster and curator of the University Organs, began the evening with J.S. Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Jones performed the impressive piece at an atypically brisk pace, but did a fine job all the same.

Tamar H. Grader ’10 continued with the Prelude in G Minor from Bach’s second Well-Tempered Clavier. The piece was short but well played. Grader set up the next performer, Yoshitaka Yamamoto ’08, very nicely.

Yamamoto played Franz Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on the name “BACH.” Yamamoto displayed agility and attention to detail here, playing blistering lines with ease on the manuals and foot-pedals alike. This was certainly one of the finer moments of the evening.

Harry Huff, the assistant organist and choirmaster of Memorial Church, took the bench then for a duet with cellist Aram V. Demirjian ’08, who is also the Musical Director of the Bach Society Orchestra. The two played “Procession Through a Black Hole” by Calvin Hampton.

The piece certainly had an astral tone throughout, with Demirjian displaying his abilities on both the low and high registers of his instrument, and Huff playing ambient swaths of sound not typically heard from a pipe organ. The piece segued into a brief arrangement of the overture from the Phantom of the Opera. The familiar themes were a crowd pleaser.

The centerpiece of the concert was the arrangement and performance of the Harry Potter theme by Matthew L. Tobey ’07. An ambitious effort, Tobey proved a capable organist, but it was unclear whether his rhythmic hesitations were part of the arrangement or a case of nerves. Tobey teased the Indiana Jones and Star Wars themes before returning to the original motif for an overly dramatic and almost cheesy finale, complete with tinkling bells.

Tobey’s piece was well received. Indeed, many had shown up just to hear this performance, as evidenced by numerous audience members who left before the next piece.

Those who left missed a great performance by Clayton W. Brooks III ’10, who played the Toccata from Leon Boellmann’s Suite Gothique. Brooks displayed talent well beyond that of many of the upperclassmen organists during this difficult piece.

Carson Cooman, Memorial Church’s research associate in music, continued with “In Your Presence is Fullness of Joy,” by Patricia Van Ness. The less intricate piece served as a fine interlude between Brooks’s intense performance and the two final pieces.

Joy-Leilani Garbutt from the Graduate School of Education played the second to last piece, a Louis Vierne Impromptu. This was another highlight, as Garbutt played through the difficult and diverse piece with clarity and poise.

James E. Goldschmidt ’09 played another famous piece to finish the evening in Charles-Marie Widor’s Toccata in F-Major. The typically majestic piece suffered a little from a slow and inconsistent tempo and a few errors, but the performance was still a worthy one.

Though not as dramatic as a great horror flick, the Halloween organ concert still had its moments. The concert gave Harvard students a chance to hear Memorial Church’s organ in a secular context and let them dress up like Harry Potter characters, too. And those two things aren’t bad at all.