Martin Jean, organist

Event time: 
Sunday, September 12, 2010 - 4:00pm
Event description: 

Music of Sowerby, Phillips, Reger, and Albright

Sherezade Panthaki, soprano

Woodrow Bynum, narrator

 

Woolsey Hall

500 College Street, New Haven

Free and open to the public, no tickets required.


 

The 2010 – 2011 season of Great Organ Music at Yale will open on Sunday, September 12 with a recital by Martin Jean, professor of organ and director of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Works of Sowerby, Reger, and Albright are on the program, which will begin at 8 pm in Woolsey Hall (corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven).

Prof. Jean has performed widely throughout the United States and Europe and is known for his broad repertorial interests. He was awarded first place at the international Grand Prix de Chartres in 1986, and in 1992 at the National Young Artists’ Competition in Organ Performance. A student of Robert Glasgow, in the fall of 1999 he spent a sabbatical with Harald Vogel in North Germany. He has performed on four continents and nearly all fifty states. In 2001 he presented a cycle of the complete organ works of Bach at Yale, and his compact discs of The Seven Last Words of Christ by Charles Tournemire and the complete Six Symphonies of Louis Vierne, both recorded in Woolsey Hall, have been released by Loft Recordings. Recordings of the organ symphonies and Stations of the Cross of Marcel Dupré are forthcoming on the Delos label.

For the program on September 12, he will be joined by the soprano Sherezade Panthaki in a performance of Leo Sowerby’s “Psalms of Faith and Penitence” based on hymn settings from the Russian Church, Ms. Panthaki, hailed by the Washington Post as “a radiant-voiced standout,” studies with James Taylor at Yale and has performed extensively throughout the United States and Europe. The first half will close with the dazzling Fantasy and Fugue on “Hallelujah, Gott zu loben” by German Romantic composer, Max Reger.

The second half of the program will consist of a single work, The King of Instruments: A Parade of Music and Verse for organ and narrator by the American composer William Albright, set to texts by the poet Eugene Haun and the composer. This piece, written in 1978 and comparable in many ways to Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, is a lighthearted musical romp through the pipes and stops of the instrument. The narrator will be Woodrow Bynum, the director of music at the Cathedral of All Saints in Albany, whose singing career has taken him across North America, performing as baritone soloist with the New York Oratorio Society, the Dallas Bach Society, and St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, among others.

The recital, presented by Yale Institute of Sacred Music, is free and open to the public; no tickets are required.