Cameron Carpenter is a conundrum. He is an organist but, as he demonstrated at Koerner Hall on Sunday afternoon, he does things no other organist would normally even dream of, much less actually pull off on a concert stage. So it’s not fair to review him as an organist.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
Once every other generation or so, someone comes along to unsettle the definition of what it means to be a pianist, or a violinist, or a visual artist, or a writer.
Cameron Carpenter, now just past the 30-year-old mark, has already proved to be one of those people with the pipe organ.
He is a big monster from an old Japanese sci-fi movie who is wantonly crushing everything in his path.
But unlike that monster, he leaves behind a vivid vapour trail that hints at all of the things no one else has thought of doing with the King of Instuments.
Like playing the entire opening of the Prelude from Bach’s first Suite for unaccompanied cello with his feet alone. Or playing Franz Liszt’s La campanella, intended for piano, with two hands, two feet, four keyboards (including pedals) and an ever-shifting array of organ stops.
His technical ability at the organ is prodigious. But it’s what he does with the choice of stops, which he is constantly manipulating, that is the real sense of awe and adventure here.
Carpenter is an orchestrator who uses the pipe organ in the way that its inventors intended, as a potential substitute for a symphony orchestra — except that he has chosen to go well beyond the traditional repertoire, making everything he hears and admires fair game for his fertile, quicklsilver artistic imagination.
This is how I have felt after every encounter with Carpenter’s playing.
But Sunday’s Koerner Hall concert had more to it than just Carpenter’s freewheeling solo turns at a borrowed Rodger’s digital organ console — which did a credible job of imitating the sounds of a substantial, three-manual acoustic pipe organ.
In the first half of the afternoon programme, Carpenter was joined by two-dozen-or-so members of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra and their music director Edwin Outwater in a performance of his concerto, The scandal.
The orchestra also played a solo piece, the five-movement Music for the Theatre suite by a brash, 25-year-old Aaron Copland.
Copland’s piece is a jazz-age-meets-art-music treat from start to finish, performed by the visitors with confidence and verve.
The orchestra was no less forthright in The Scandal, with Carpenter merrily rollicking away at the keyboards. Except that this really wasn’t a great piece of music.
There are many interesting musical themes that Carpenter throws around. He drops clever little quotes from the 20th century concert organ repertoire, and he pulls off some ear-opening stunts in mixing instrumental timbres. But the sum of all these parts is a big, boldly colourful, messy tapestry desperately looking for purpose and meaning.
Left alone on stage after intermission, Carpenter found the unity of purpose in his music, taking breathtaking solo turns through the music of Bach before turning to Frédéric Chopin — and when one attempt at rendering an Étude at the organ failed, we were treated to a unique and memorable performance of the Liszt Campanella.
We couldn’t expect anything like this from anyone else. And what made Sunday’s concert all the more surprising was that it was almost cancelled because Carpenter woke up in the morning with a raging fever.
That’s called commitment.
So, if I can’t review him as an organist, what can I do?
I can call him an exceptional entertainer, starting with flashes of light from his rhinestone-encrusted heels and ending with the runs of a Chopin Étude rendered on the pedals.
I can also call him an exceptional orchestrator, with the difference that the orchestra happened to be contained inside a movable wooden box with keyboards attached to it.
But, most aptly of all, Cameron Carpenter is a free spirit that took us on a wild adventure ride, and left just about everyone at Koerner Hall with a big smile on their face by the end.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
