Organist Gail Archer to Bring Recital to SF

My encounters with performances on a pipe organ have been few and far between. Most of the recent ones have taken place a short walk from where I live, at the Church of the Advent of Christ the King where Paul Ellison is Director of Music. Those are occasions when his Schola Adventus vocalists contribute to the service, and Ellison himself will then provide an organ postlude. Where recordings are concerned, my most recent encounter seems to have been at the end of last year, when ICA Classics released its fourth BBC Legends collection in which a CD of performances by Nadia Boulanger included Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 48 setting of the Requiem text and three selections of sacred music by Lili Boulanger.

Concert organist Gail Archer (photograph courtesy of AMT Public Relations)

At the beginning of next month, organist Gail Archer will visit San Francisco. I have not previously encountered her on any of my recordings, let alone in performance. However, she drew my attention when I learned that she was the first American woman to perform the complete works for organ composed by Olivier Messiaen. Sadly (at least for me), she has not included any of Messiaen’s music on her program.

However, as might be guessed, she will begin her program with Johann Sebastian Bach. Her opening selection will be the BWV 548 prelude and fugue in E minor. This will be followed by the BWV 653 setting of the “Leipzig” chorale, “An Wasserflüssen Babylon” (by the waters of Babylon). These selections will be “reflected” at the conclusion of the program with two compositions by Franz Liszt. The first of these will be the “Consolation” in D-flat major. The program will then finish up by reflecting on the beginning with the “Fantasy and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H.”

Archer seems to have prepared an “arch” structure (pun entirely accidental) for her program, whose “keystone” will consist of three short pieces composed by Nadia Boulanger in 1911. On either side of that “keystone” will be selections from the nineteenth, twentieth, and current centuries. The composers in the first half will be (in “order of appearance”) Fanny Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, Joan Tower, Mary Howe, and Grażyna Bacewicz. Those in the second half will be almost all Ukrainian: Viktor Goncharenko, Svitlana Ostrova, and Mykola Kolessa. They will be preceded by an instrumental “Te Deum” setting by French organist Jeanne Demessieux.

This performance will begin at 5 p.m. on Sunday, November 3. The venue will be the Trinity + St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, which is located at 1650 Gough Street on the corner of Bush Street. (For those that do not yet know, this is one of the buildings that survived the 1906 earthquake and fire.) There will be no charge for admission.