The organist Renée Anne Louprette, far left, and the conductor Kent Tritle, far right, on Monday night.
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About 350 organists are registered participants in the regional convention of the American Guild of Organists this week in New York. Some of them could be overheard on Monday night talking with admiration about the organ at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue, before a concert there with the church’s orchestra.
Those who know more about the subject than I do say this church’s organ, completed in 1993 by Mander Organs in London, is a magnificent instrument that combines modern technology with historical elements. The organ certainly sounded glorious in three concertos and one de facto concerto, Samuel Barber’s “Toccata Festiva,” during Monday night’s concert, which was conducted by Kent Tritle, the director of music ministries at St. Ignatius. The program was just one of several taking place each day at churches around town, courtesy of the convention.
Of course, St. Ignatius is a church, not a concert hall, so the instrument is in the organ and choir loft at the back of the church, opposite the altar. This location achieves the intended acoustical and spiritual impact: music sounds as if it is floating into the church from some heavenly realm. But it also creates a problem in presenting concerts, since people in the pews sit with their backs to the musicians, who on Monday were almost completely hidden behind a tall gleaming row of organ pipes. So the guild set up a video screen in front of the altar, enabling the audience to see, at least in profile, the soloist, Mr. Tritle and theplayers.
It was good to hear the 1960 Barber work, which truly evokes Bach organ toccatas in its restless and forbidding opening episode, alive with fantastical explorations of chromatic harmony. During a ruminative segment, when the strings gently play a poignant melodic line, trading phrases with the organ in its soft-spoken mode, there was an affecting contrast between the throbbing richness of the strings and the austere, reedy steadiness of the organ, played sensitively by the impressive young soloist, James Feddeck.
Renée Anne Louprette, a technically nimble and dynamic organist who is associate music director at St. Ignatius, was the soloist in the next two works. First came the Chorale and Waltz from Ned Rorem’s 1985 Organ Concerto. But why were only these two short movements from this smart and elegant piece played? Mr. Rorem’s music became, in effect, a prelude to Poulenc’s Concerto in G minor, one of the best-known organ concertos, a 1938 score in which Stravinsky-like harmonic pungency has a face-off with Parisian lyrical élan. The performance won a deserved ovation.
So did the performance of Stephen Paulus’s substantive 1992 concerto for organ, timpani, percussion and strings, by Nancianne Parrella, associate organist at St. Ignatius. I especially liked the rhapsodic first movement, which builds to an unsettling segment when punchy orchestra chords jab at the thin-textured musings of the organ.
At the end, the evening’s soloists and Mr. Tritle appeared at the edge of the choir loft to wave to audience members, who stood and turned around to cheer them.
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