Organist Gail Archer Returning with Bulgarians

The organ that Gail Archer will be playing on her visit to San Francisco (from the home page for the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption)

Organist Gail Archer’s touring schedule last took her to San Francisco a little over a year ago. Her repertoire was, to say the least, impressive, beginning with selections by Johann Sebastian Bach that would have been familiar to most Bach mavens and concluding with three Ukrainian composers probably unknown to most of her audience: Viktor Goncharenko, Svitlana Ostrova, and Mykola Kolessa. She will return in a little over a month’s time, this time drawing upon her latest album, Dobrich: A Bulgarian Odyssey, for her program. (For those unfamiliar with the title, Dobrich is a city in Bulgaria with a concert hall that has a 1979 Schuke organ with 36 stops and two manuals.)

The album has eleven tracks accounting for seven different composers, four of whom are living. Most likely, all of those names will be unfamiliar to most readers. Fortunately, the “Editorial Reviews” section of the Amazon.com Web page provides a brief but useful introduction to all of them. Two of them, Velislav Zaimov and Radosveta Hurkova, enjoy two separate tracks.

I must confess that, even after listening to this album several times, my ears are still adjusting to the content. To be fair, where the composers allocated two tracks are concerned, I am not sure that side-by-side listening to one of those pairs would encourage me to recognize that they had the same composer! Nevertheless, this album is definitely a “journey of discovery” for anyone interested in the pipe organ repertoire. After all, how often does one ask, “Guess what this is?” before playing a recording to an audience of friends?

Having established the merits of this content, I am now happy to announce that readers in the Bay Area will have the opportunity to attend a performance of this music. It will take place in the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption, which is located at 1111 Gough Street, south of Geary Boulevard. The concert will begin at 4 p.m. on Sunday, January 18. No information has been provided regarding a price of admission, so I assume that donations will be accepted.