organ concert

Earlier this week I heard about an organ concert at St. Mark's Cathedral on the radio and reached for my credit card the moment I saw how cheap tickets were. $15 might not everyone's definition of dirt cheap, but I've been more than a little conscious about ticket prices for classical concerts around here ever since my Mexican friend L. from GT told me with horror, when he heard what the Seattle Symphony charged for a seat on the second tier, that in Mexico City he was accustomed to listening to world-class classical performances for a mere $5. The Seattle Symphony charged me $85 for such a seat, by the way, on the opening night of the season last month. Jean-Yves Thibaudet was the soloist that night in Kachaturian's Piano Concerto, but even so, I couldn't help picturing a utopia in which I paid $5 for the privilege of listening to him.

St. Mark's Cathedral is located on Capitol Hill, in a quaint ecumenical neighborhood that strikes you as exactly the kind of place where you'd find a church of this size. Capitol Hill, like other hills in the Seattle area, doesn't quite register as a hill in the proper sense until you undertake the walk there from Eastlake. I was surprised and caught off guard by the "I-5 Colonnade", where the steepness of the path under the widest section of I-5 reminded me of the more difficult hikes I've been on. But even that did not prepare me for the "Stairway to Heaven" that I encountered when I thought I'd ascended to some great height above the city and thoroughly robbed me of any sense of achievement I may have felt. A single leisurely trip up these stairs is a great substitute for leg day at the gym. My Fitbit registered 28 floors when I finally reached St. Mark's Cathedral, and I felt like one who had made it to the Tiger's Nest Monastery in Bhutan by scaling the face of the cliff on which it is perched. ​

I had never heard of Szilard Kovacs before yesterday, and by the end of the evening I was outraged by the injustice of it: Kovacs is a consummate artist and a virtuoso on the order of Liszt. He won first prize at the International Franz Liszt Organ Competition in 1999, and his original compositions - some of which he played at yesterday's concert - are played by other organists to packed houses at much larger venues than St. Mark's. Yet Kovacs only has 420 followers on YouTube. (I became one of them yesterday.) The program was exquisite. I was initially a little disappointed by the paucity of Bach. There were five Chorale Preludes, but I had been hoping for something more intense, like a Toccata and Fugue in the BWV 530s to 560s range or my personal favorite, the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582.

However, from the moment the first D of John Stanley's Voluntary in D Minor rang out in the nave, I was spellbound. The Flentrop Organ at St. Mark's is a magnificent instrument. Even as a medium-sized organ, it filled the Cathedral in such a way that it almost seemed as if it were light that was issuing from its burnished and brazen pipes rather than sound. I was pleasantly surprised by the acoustics in the nave. Each note of the Flentrop was crisp, and there was just enough echo so that the organ didn't drown itself out in its immense sound and still managed to sound like a reverberant old-world instrument from Bach's age. Kovacs explored the whole range of registration available to him. The modern fashion, especially with Baroque composers, is to stick with a heavy reedy registration for the duration of a piece (coughTonKoopmancough), which I can't say I much fancy.

By the end of the evening, I no longer missed the Bach that I had hoped to hear and was rather grateful for the chance to be exposed to new repertoire. Kovacs's original compositions were stellar. His Sortie and his Variations on a Hungarian Sacred Song were both immensely exciting as well as highly sophisticated compositions that made me wonder why Kovacs wasn't more widely known. Apart from that, I was completely taken with the two selections from Cesar Franck's Trois pieces pour grand orgue: the Cantabile and the Piece Heroique. The Piece Heroique, in particular, is one that I have kept coming back today because of its original harmonies and exciting all-stops-out climaxes. As I left St. Mark's, I felt slightly guilty for having spent only $15 on such an exhilarating and uplifting evening. I already have my eyes on two other organ concerts at St. Mark's early next year - pocket change compared to the two Seattle Symphony tickets I'm sitting on.