In spite of only coming back to Hawaii on Tuesday, I’ve had to hit the ground running and will be playing several different organs within the week. Next weekend will especially be busy because of a Friday night rehearsal and Sunday concert at St. John Vianney, playing the prelude for Pastor Fritz Fritschel‘s funeral service on the Lutheran Church of Honolulu’s Beckerath organ Saturday morning, and playing a funeral at Iolani School the same afternoon. The next day I’ll have a rehearsal with the Iolani School Chorus for their May concert and will have to contend with the aging electronic organ in the chorus room. I am also starting work for a fall concert which you will read about later in this post.

Yesterday I went to St. John Vianney Church to register the organ for next week’s performance of Requiem by John Alexander and met with Robert Mondoy, a long-time colleague and a prolific composer. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the spacious building is very live in spite of having so much glass. The organ, an old electronic instrument which apparently was donated several years ago, has no pistons or crescendo pedal (registration aids) which will make it a bit of a challenge to effect quick crescendos and diminuendos. (But as Joey Fala told me recently, using a crescendo pedal is cheating, something he heard from his first organ teacher!!!) 

I should be grateful, though, that everything works and what is interesting is that while the organ only has internal speakers, it is able to be heard at the same loudness everywhere in the building as heard from the organ bench! This is a truly unique situation—usually the organist has the worst seat in the house and cannot hear the balance between the organ and choir. Hopefully this will make it easier to accompany the 100-voice Windward Choral Society, which will take up a good part of the chancel area.

Yesterday I also had a rehearsal with Jieun Kim Newland and Sachi Hirakouji in preparation for a concert the three of us will be giving on October 13 at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu. The concert will be called “Organs 1-2-3: Three Pipe Organs • Three Organists.” It means that I’ll be moving my home continuo organ to the church to join the big Beckerath organ and the small Beckerath continuo. Where else in this town would you be able to hear three separate pipe organs in one building? The concert will feature music for one, two and three organs and we’re already having a lot of fun with duet and trio music from the 17th and 18th centuries. One of the pieces even has the three of us sitting on one organ bench! If you have a good memory, Joe Pettit, Keith Thompson and I did a similar program in 2003 except that we did not have three pipe organs, only two.

I had already picked Jieun to play one of the other organs, and then the two of us mutually decided that there was only one other person we would choose for the third organ part—Sachi! She has a doctorate in piano from the University of Washington and has a busy schedule as accompanist for Punahou School, and member of the Ardente Trio with Darel Stark (violin) and Pauline Bai (cello). In addition to being an active chamber musician, she has performed as a featured soloist with the University of Hawaii Symphony Orchestra, University of Washington Symphony Orchestra and toured the neighboring islands with the Hawaii Opera Theater. Sachi has also been taking organ lessons with me for the last two years.

It has only been five days since I came home from North Carolina and Amsterdam and if you can believe this, I’m already planning my next trips, the first of which will be in just one month. I’ll be flying to Los Angeles the end of May to attend my grandson’s first birthday party already!

On May 18th, though, I’ll be playing for Iolani School’s Spring Concert at St. Andrew’s Cathedral, and will have to fight with the four manual Aeolian-Skinner organ there. I say fight because it’s like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: You never know what you’re gonna get, and are always surprised by new dead notes or ciphers or worse!

Then less than a month later, I’ll be going along with the Hawaii Masterworks Chorus as organist on their tour of Vienna, Salzburg and Prague. Afterwards, my plan is to join a GoAhead tour of Amsterdam, Luxembourg and Brussels, then I’ll spend a week in Hamburg, Germany. I’ll be staying with organbuilder Hans-Ulrich and Christiane Erbsloeh, who make frequent trips to Hawaii to service and/or install organs here. Then it’s off to London for a week where I’ll meet with Joan Ishibashi, then finally to the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford. It’s a 41-day trip, only to come home for two-and-a-half weeks, then I’m off to Switzerland for 10 days, 11 nights for another Historic Organ Study Tour.

I’m supposed to be retired—are you exhausted yet?