Saturday, May 16, 2009
Organ tandem in harmony at Greene Memorial United Methodist Church
Send us your religion news Your Community, P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke, VA 24010 or e-mail yourcommunity@roanoke.comFor two organists, performing together is "exhilarating."
JEANNA DUERSCHERL The Roanoke Times
Juilliard-trained organists Daniel Sullivan and Isabelle Demers will give a free concert Sunday in downtown Roanoke.
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Since 2005, when Isabelle Demers and Daniel Sullivan met as students at The Juilliard School in New York, the two have pushed the organ's boundaries by collapsing multilayered orchestral compositions into the simultaneous performance of two organs.
They are scheduled to perform during a free concert at 4 p.m. Sunday at downtown Roanoke's Greene Memorial United Methodist Church.
"It's extremely rare," said Richard Cummins, director of music at the church.
Indeed, organists have rearranged orchestral compositions for their instrument, but it's unusual for two musicians to perform side by side. With two pairs of hands and feet, they can cover twice as many textures as one.
Sullivan, 30, who grew up home schooled in Wisconsin, was trained at Oberlin Conservatory, Yale University and Juilliard. He's performed solo from San Francisco to Atlanta, released a debut album of Bach's Goldberg variations in 2008, and is on Juilliard's faculty.
Demers, 27, a native of Montreal, was educated at the Montreal Conservatory of Music, the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris-Alfred Cortot in Paris and at Juilliard. She is organist of Trinity Church on Wall Street and will be a featured artist at the 2009 convention of the Royal Canadian College of Organists in Toronto.
Before a concert in 2005, when Demers and Sullivan were going to each perform solo, they arranged Sergei Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," a 1930s allegorical composition about Russian communism. Since then, they've used their vast knowledge of their sonic resources to introduce arrangements from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet and Ludwig van Beethoven's 7th Symphony, among others.
In the relatively lonely world of organists, who generally perform their pipe instrument alone, the two musicians say they can challenge each other and exchange ideas to interpret compositions.
Video: Greene Memorial United Methodist's tandem organists
Video by Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times
"It's like a think tank in a way," Sullivan said. "When you get creative people together, it's quite exhilarating because you're encountering another mind."
And logistically, it's very unlikely to find two organs in one venue. After all, organs generally cost upward of $100,000, and many churches raise money for years to buy even a small one.
For Sunday's concert, the duo will use the church's 83-year-old pipe organ, and a borrowed digital one from the Allen Organ Factory in Pennsylvania. So the difference between that concert and any other one at the church? It's auditory as well as material.
Said Cummins: "There's a difference of about a million and a half dollars."
