Parker
Ramsay, the first American to serve as Organ Scholar at King’s College,
Cambridge, records rarely heard organ works composed by George
Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931), the famed American known for his
symphonic and chamber works and who led the New England Conservatory
1897-1930. Ramsay plays Aeolian-Skinner op. 1257 of 1955 at Winthrop
University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, tonally finished by G. Donald
Harrison 10 months before his death as the last large organ he
completed. The organ was restored in 2009 without tonal changes by
Orgues Létourneau. Fine acoustics! Prelude Recitative Pastorale on a Cipher Romance Tema Finale Fuga Three Pieces: Prelude Response March in B-flat In Tadaussac Church 1735 March Ecossaise Pastorale in E-flat Requiem Canzonetta in G Elegy (in memoriam H. Parker) Theme, Variations and Fugue (arr. by Wallace Goodrich) Theme: Andantino con moto Var. I: L’istesso tempo Var. II: Più mosso brillante Var. III: Alla pastorella Var. IV: Allegro risoluto Var. V: Andante sostenuto Var. VI: Molto moderato Finale: Introduction and Fugue George Whitefield Chadwick 1854-1931 by Murray Forbes Somerville Biographer Bill Faucett characterizes composer George W. Chadwick as “the Pride of New England.” By contrast, the official history of New England Conservatory, where Chadwick was President from 1897 to 1930, describes him as “a church organist, rather than a musician”! While indeed he was a church organist until into his fifties, he also wrote three symphonies, performed by the Boston Symphony and many other orchestras, as well as two operas, nearly 150 songs, six orchestral tone poems, chamber music, and as the present recording attests, several significant organ works. Early years, education, professional organist and teacher Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1854, into a musical family, Chadwick took his first organ lessons from his elder brother Fitts Henry. At the age of 16 he graduated from blowing the organ to playing it, at the Congregational Church in Lawrence; after finishing high school, he commenced study at the recently founded New England Conservatory, studying organ and piano. But his father,
despite having a fine voice and running his own singing school, was
opposed to a musical career for his son, instead planning to take the
young man into his flourishing insurance business. This was particularly
necessary when the 1872 Great Fire of Boston gave the firm almost more
business than it could handle. In the summer of
1876, fate took a hand. Because of illness, Olivet College in Michigan
suddenly needed a professor of music; after being recommended by his
older NEC classmate Theodore Presser, Chadwick was appointed despite
being only 22. He excelled there, but found little musical stimulation
in the midwest; having saved all his salary, he chose not to return to
Boston, but to travel to Germany for the musical study he craved. This
became the most formative musical experience in his career. He began in
Leipzig in 1877, studying composition at the famous conservatory under
Salomon Jadassohn. The two quickly developed a fine rapport, with the
young professor proclaiming his student to have “a completely
exceptional talent for composition.” After a year and a half, and a
summer spent touring Germany, Chadwick moved to Munich, another great
musical center, and enrolled in the composition class of noted organist
Josef Rheinberger. However, the money had run
out: by this time his father had passed away, and the two never
reconciled after Chadwick went to Europe. So, he returned to Boston
after just three months in Munich, and resumed teaching. He also resumed
his profession as organist, being appointed to St. John’s and St.
James’s Episcopal Church in Roxbury; finding the position involved too
many services for too little pay, he transferred to Clarendon Street
Baptist Church in Boston. One of his first pupils on his return was
Horatio Parker, who quickly became a friend as well as pupil. In
1882, he was appointed organist at the Park Street Church in Boston;
this position came with an apartment at the church. While the Appleton
organ from 1838 was quite antiquated (although he found it “very sweet
in tone”), the job gave him a place to teach and live right in the heart
of downtown. In 1883, he returned to Germany for a visit, and in 1885
he married Ida May Crocker. The couple settled in Boston, taking an
apartment on Boylston Street near Hollis Street Unitarian, where
Chadwick had been appointed musician in 1884. His final church position,
from 1893 to 1904, was at the Second Universalist Church in Boston. Composer, conductor and NEC president His first major orchestral work, completed in 1879 for an exam requirement in Leipzig, was an overture entitled Rip Van Winkle. This was an instant success; one German reviewer called it “uncontestably…the best of this year’s compositions.“ He also wrote two string quartets during his time in Leipzig, which were also well received. Not
least of the reasons for the overture’s success was the assurance of the
composer’s conducting. On his return to Boston, he sought to further
his conducting career, which received a boost when he was invited to
conduct at Sanders Theatre the music for Oedipus Rex by Harvard’s John
Knowles Paine. In 1887, he became conductor of the Boston Orchestral
Club, a position he held till 1891. In 1889, he began conducting the
Springfield Music Festivals each spring, continuing for the next ten
years and leading a wide variety of choral and orchestral music; in 1898
he also took over the Worcester Music Festival, leading that until
1901. However, the establishment of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in
1881, with its exclusivity clause for its players and its string of
German conductors personally selected by founder Colonel Higginson,
sucked much of the air out of other orchestral endeavors in the area.
Chadwick could make little inroad. Between the
time of his return to Boston and the turn of the century came a prolific
period as an orchestral composer. He wrote three symphonies, following
the example of Paine, as well as a set of Symphonic Sketches, a
Sinfonietta, and a Suite Symphonique; a German review even hailed his
Third Symphony as “the best of all that have been written since Brahms.”
And he commenced a series of overtures and “poems” after the manner of
the Rip Van Winkle overture, particularly a set “to the three Muses”
Thalia, Melpomene, and Euterpe. His orchestral music is distinguished by
its brilliant orchestration, and a certain lightness of touch that
departs from his Germanic models. All this time
he continued to teach at New England Conservatory. Its mercurial
founder, Eben Tourjee, had passed away in 1891; the torch was passed to a
German-born member of the piano faculty, Carl Faelten. This proved an
unwise choice; Faelten’s high-handed rigidity quickly antagonized
faculty and trustees, and he was forced out in 1897. And so Chadwick,
with his high musical visibility as composer and conductor, his early
business background working for his father, his membership in all the
right clubs such as the St. Botolph Club and the Tavern Club, his
forthright personality and sense of humor, and not least his solid New
England roots, was, despite his lack of higher degrees (in fact, degrees
of any kind), the unanimous choice to take over the institution. He
set to with a will. He finished and published his Harmony textbook,
which became an American staple for years; he appointed several new
faculty members, including Wallace Goodrich as organ professor; he laid
his steadying hand upon the Conservatory’s shaky finances; and he
started laying the foundations for a full panoply of orchestral
instrument study, with the goal of ultimately fielding a full orchestra
from within. He oversaw the construction of a new facility on Huntingdon
Avenue, having at its heart the acoustically perfect Jordan Hall,
containing a fine Hutchings concert organ. He
set sail to Europe again to study conservatories there; but on the way
over, slipped on deck and fractured his ankle. It could not be operated
on till he reached Britain; by then the damage was done. He walked with a
limp for the rest of his life and was no longer able to play the organ.
In any case, his increasing duties at the Conservatory meant he no
longer had time for outside activities such as conducting or church
music. A major professional disappointment came in 1912: his grand opera Il Padrone
was rejected by the Metropolitan Opera. The problem was not the music
but the libretto, which cast an unflattering light on the Italian
immigrant experience in America. But he had much success with his
overture Tam O’Shanter, premiered at the Norfolk, Connecticut, Festival in 1915, and quickly taken up by orchestras around the country. Chadwick
retired from the Conservatory in 1930, by that time much afflicted by
heart disease and gout. His music, too, was no longer fashionable. He
passed away just a year later, ironically on the day of the premiere of
his last orchestra work, the Tre Pezzi, begun in 1916 and completed in 1925. The Organ Music Chadwick’s organ output falls chronologically into three segments. Until his appointment as NEC President in 1897, when he no longer had the time for a church position (also precluded by his ankle injury), he had composed a steady stream of smaller pieces for his instrument, starting mainly in 1876 with instructional material in the form of canons mostly in trio form, ten of which he produced in 1885. He also wrote a set of Pedal Etuden in 1890 from which he subsequently extracted the Prelude and Response, adding the March in B-flat, to form the Three Pieces, the earliest works here recorded. In 1896, a number of short character pieces were published, including the Pastorale, Canzonetta, and Requiem. In 1908, he conducted the newly formed NEC orchestra in a substantial new work for organ and orchestra, the Theme, Variations and Fugue,
in which the soloist on the Jordan Hall organ was his friend and
faculty colleague Wallace Goodrich. Goodrich subsequently arranged this
work for organ solo (the version here recorded).This remained the only
organ work during his presidency until the sudden death in December,
1919, of his long-time friend, former pupil, now Yale professor, Horatio
Parker, at the early age of 55. This prompted the deeply felt Elegy, which marked Chadwick’s return to organ composition in 1920 (the work was later orchestrated). A new relationship with the H. W. Gray publishing firm yielded the Suite in Variation Form of 1921, as well as the “musical poem” of 1926, In Tadaussac Church 1735,
portraying a historic little church in Quebec where the Chadwicks had
vacationed. Chadwick writes, “The quaint little church. . . at the mouth
of the Saguenay river. . . is surmounted by a belfry in which hangs a
diminutive church bell, still used, as a call to worship. In the
chancel is set a little figurine of the Holy Child which is an object of
veneration to devout worshippers. The character of this piece was
suggested by these features.“ The Marche Ecossaise seems to be a late work, but is full of the composer’s sense of light-hearted fun; it perhaps reflects the new-found interest in Celtic culture following the First World War. Parker Ramsay Parker
Ramsay is known in the United States, Europe and Asia as an
accomplished soloist and accompanist, having been the first American to
serve as Organ Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge University. Born to
musician parents in Nashville, Tennessee, Parker maintains an active
solo career on three instruments: harp, organ and harpsichord. Hailed by BBC Music Magazine
as a “model of intelligence” and the New York Times as “playing with
verve,” Parker Ramsay has performed at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the
Royal Albert Hall (London), the Musée d’Orsay (Paris), the National
Center for the Performing Arts (Beijing), Sejong Center for the
Performing Arts (Seoul), Verizon Hall (Philadelphia), Carnegie Hall and
Alice Tully Hall (New York City). He has performed with conductors David
Hill, Alan Gilbert, Jeff Milarsky, Pablo Heras-Casado and Mirga
Gražinyte-Tyla. Festival appearances have included the Gergiev Festival
in Rotterdam, the Dubrovnik Summer Music Festival, the Cambridge Summer
Music Festival, the Cambridge New Music Project, the 800 Jahre Thomana
Celebration in Leipzig, the Juilliard Focus! Festival, and the 2012
American Guild of Organists National Convention. As a continuo player,
he has performed with the Academy of Ancient Music, the Academy of
Sacred Drama, and the Shanghai Camerata. In 2014, he received First
Prize at the Amsterdam International Organ Competition. Parker’s
tenure with the Choir of King’s College included accompanying the
Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in 2012, broadcast live world-wide,
as well as six international tours and four recordings. Parker holds a
master’s degree in historical performance from Oberlin Conservatory,
where he studied with James David Christie, Webb Wiggins, and Lisa
Crawford, as well as a master’s degree in harp from the Juilliard
School, where he studied with Nancy Allen. In
addition to his work as a performer and as organist and choirmaster of
Christ and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in New York, he works as a
staff writer for VAN Magazine (Berlin) and runs a blog, Harping On: Thoughts from a Recovering Organist. The D. B. Johnson Memorial Organ, James F. Byrnes Auditorium Winthrop University, Rock Hill, South Carolina Byrnes Auditorium seats 3,500 and was completed in 1939. It is named for U.S. Senator (later Secretary of State) James F. Byrnes, who secured funding for the building via the Works Progress Administration. After World War II, Dean of Music Walter Roberts was responsible for commissioning the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company to build the present four-manual instrument as a memorial to David Bancroft Johnson (1856-1928) who founded Winthrop University in 1886. G.
Donald Harrison, president and famed tonal director of Aeolian-Skinner,
spent much of August 1955 in the hall, personally voicing the instrument
in the hall’s remarkably favorable acoustic; it turned out to be his
last completed organ, and bears an ivory nameplate with his signature.
It has remained tonally untouched, except for a re-ordering of the Swell
Plein Jeu by Aeolian-Skinner in 1965. In 2007-09, the instrument was
restored by Orgues Létourneau of Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec. Under the
supervision of Dr. David Lowry, now Professor Emeritus, nothing was
altered tonally. The console gained a solid-state combination system
with 256 levels of memory and a sequencer. Aeolian-Skinner Op. 1257, 1955, Restored by Orgues Létourneau, 2009 Byrnes Auditorium, Winthrop University, Rock Hill, South Carolina 4 manuals, 3,820 pipes GREAT Man. II unencl. 3¾" pressure 16' Contre Geigen 8' Diapason 8' Spitz Principal 8' Holzgedeckt 4' Principal 4' Flute 2-2/3' Quint 2' Super Octave III-IV Cornet IV Fourniture 8' Trompette en Chamade POS 4' Clairon en Chamade POS Chimes CH ‡ Sw/Gt 16 8 4 Ch/Gt 16 8 4 Pos/Gt 16 8 Manual Transfer (Gt-Ch)‡ ‡These items added 2009 SWELL Man. III encl. 6” pressure 16' Flauto Dolce ext 8' Geigen Principal 8' Stopped Diapason 8' Viole de Gambe 8' Viole Celeste 8' Flauto Dolce 8' Flute Celeste TC 4' Prestant 4' Flauto Traverso 2' Fifteenth III Plein Jeu* 16' Fagot 8' Trompette 8' Hautbois 8' Vox Humaine 4' Clairon Tremulant Sw 16 8 4 Pos/Sw 8 All Swells to Swell *Swell Plein Jeu altered by A-S voicer Arthur Birchall, 1965 CHOIR Man. I encl. 5” pressure 8' Viola 8' Viola Celeste 8' Dulciana 8' Concert Flute 4' Prestant 4' Flûte Harmonique II Sesquialtera 16' English Horn 8' Cromorne 4' Rohr Schalmei 8' Trompette en Chamade POS 4' Clairon en Chamade POS Tremulant Chimes 25 tubes Ch 16 8 4 Pos/Ch 16‡ 8 Sw/Ch 16 8 4 Pos/Ch 16 8 POSITIV Man. IV unencl. 3” press 8' Nason Flöte 4' Koppelflöte 2' Principal 1-3/5' Tierce 1-1/3' Larigot III Cymbal 8' Trompette en Chamade 8" pressure** 4' Clairon en Chamade EXT PEDAL 5” pressure 32' Contre Basse *** 16' Contre Basse*** 16' Geigen GT*** 16' Bourdon 16' Flauto Dolce SW 8' Principal 8' Gedeckt 4' Choral Bass 4' Nachthorn 2' Blockflöte IV Mixture 32' Fagot SW EXT 16' Bombarde 8" pressure 16' Fagot SW 8' Trompette BOMB 4' Clairon BOMB 8' Trompette en Chamade POS Chimes CH Gt/Ped Sw/Ped 8 4 Ch/Ped 8 4 Pos/Ped 8 Combination Action SSOS‡ 256 levels, 8 Gen., 8 Ped 6 Pos, 8 Sw, 8 Gt, 8 Ch Sequencer 7 + and 3 – **The Trompette en Chamade unit, which has always been vertical, is on a separate chest and was moved from the top of Great/Pedal chamber down about three feet to the grillework for better projection of sound. The middle 5 resonators, c25 to e28, were replaced with full length resonators in 1975. ***The Pedal 32' Contre Basse is not an extension of the Pedal 16' Contre Basse; it is the Gt/Ped 16' Geigen with an extension of 12 pipes in the 32' octave on 6¼" pressure (the same pressure as most of the independent 16’ Pedal Contre Basse) though some pipes of the 16' octave of the Geigen are on 5" pressure. |
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