When you walk into the Lutheran Church of Honolulu on Saturday night, January 18th, for our Dueling Bach concert, you may notice that the chairs are in a slightly different configuration. With the main Beckerath organ on one end of the church, and the Beckerath continuo organ on the other, the chairs have been arranged so that nearly everyone in the audience can have one ear on the big organ and the other ear on the little organ! (Assuming you have one ear on each side of your head!)
Jieun Kim Newland and I will be performing six different concertos (plus three other pieces) in which we literally “throw” the melody back and forth between the two organs, and we thought it would be optimal (and fun!) for the audience to sit in the middle. (Aren’t you lucky! I wish I could hear this concert from the middle!)
I remember when Carl Crosier conducted two performances of the St. Matthew Passion in the year 2000, and placed Choir I with Orchestra I with the big organ on the Diamond Head side versus Choir II and Orchestra II with the continuo organ on the Ewa side of the church. We placed the pews (in those days), in “collegiate” style, facing each other with a center middle aisle.
When we talked with people afterwards, no matter where they were seated, they swore that they had “the best seat in the house!”
This Saturday, though, the big difference will be that the altar platform will remain in place on the “mauka” (mountain side) of the church, and on either side, the chairs have been turned to face the middle.
A new trend in many mainland organ recitals which has contributed to audience enjoyment is to set up a live video feed of the organist and projected on a screen. So many times, the organ console is hidden in a balcony, or behind a pillar, or in the case at LCH, all people see of me is my back! In Saturday’s concert, I have arranged to have a live video feed on each organ, projected on either side of the altar platform, so now you’ll have a chance to see what our fingers and feet are doing up close and personal!
But of course, there is a Sunday service the next day, so I hope a few people can volunteer to stay afterwards to help us put the chairs back into the “normal” configuration. Pretty please, so that Jieun and I don’t have to spend the night doing this all ourselves!
And come back for the Sunday worship service at 10:30 am, when I will be “guest organist” at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu this coming Sunday as well as next week—my first time to play a service here in seven years! This will be a triple header weekend with the Dueling Bach concert on Saturday night; the next morning I’ll be playing the 9:00 am service at Waiokeola Congregational Church; and then right after the postlude, I’ll speed down the H-1 Freeway to hopefully arrive 5 minutes before playing the prelude at LCH! Scott Fikse, the music director, has promised to reserve me a parking space!
Yikes!
For some fun reading, go back and read my post about Duo Organists. How far we’ve come!