Category Archives: Venues

The Church of the Advent

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The Church of the Advent

The Church of the Advent

Founded in 1844 to bring the liturgical reforms of the eleven-year-old Oxford Movement to America’s shores, The Church of the Advent immediately garnered both converts and controversy for the cause of Anglo-Catholicism. On his first visit, the Bishop of Massachusetts was so offended by the presence of a cross and candlesticks on the altar that he vowed never to return unless they were removed (they were not, he did). John Sturgis designed a church perfectly attuned to High Church liturgy and music, derived from English models and blessed with a fine acoustic. Since its consecration in 1892, the parish has devoted considerable resources to a music program, including an eighteen-voice professional choir that performs some sixty Mass settings and 150 anthems and motets per year.

Since 1883, the Advent has known only two organs: its original and perhaps forgettable Hutchings-Plaisted, and its pacesetting and much-revered 1936 Aeolian-Skinner. Together with its sister Aeolian-Skinner at Groton School, the Advent organ was the first to encapsulate G. Donald Harrison’s fully mature concepts of tonal design and voicing: entirely straight stoplist, low pressures, unenclosed Positiv, and emphasis on flue choruses rather than on reed as the dominating tonal ingredient. (Its stoplist was such a break from the usual Anglo-American affair, few people noticed it contained neither harp nor chimes.) After minor changes in 1941 and 1950, the flue choruses were revoiced to be brighter, louder, and more articulate in 1964, with several flutes being rebuilt or replaced. Nelson Barden undertook much important mechanical restoration from 1978 to 2005; tonal restoration from 2005 forward, by Jonathan Ambrosino, has reversed the most obvious work of 1964. While created as much with organ literature as accompaniment in mind, the organ’s layered choruses and mixtures provide a subtle and sophisticated accompanimental partner to the professional choir, and more than anything its tutti recalls the multi-mixtured, nineteenth-century English organs of Willis, Lewis, and Hill.

 

Church of the AdventAeolian-Skinner Organ Co., Opus 940, 1936, 1964

Nelson Barden Associates, Inc. – 1978-2000, mechanical restoration
Jonathan Ambrosino – 2007, tonal restoration

 

 

First Lutheran Church of Boston

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First Lutheran Church of Boston

First Lutheran Church of Boston

Founded in 1839 as the German Lutheran Society, First Lutheran is affiliated with the Missouri Synod and is the oldest such congregation in New England. Outgrowing earlier buildings of 1847 and 1899 in Boston’s South End, the church experienced rapid growth when English replaced German in its services in the early twentieth century. The present Back Bay building was designed between 1954 and 1957 by Pietro Belluschi, dean of the MIT School of Architecture until 1965, known for his work on New York’s Pan Am building and Alice Tully Hall, and on the symphony halls of Baltimore and San Francisco. First Lutheran’s graceful roof floating over a red-brick coffer makes an elegant case for integrating a Modernist building into a staunchly Victorian neighborhood.

 

In the 1960s and ’70s, Boston-area churches commissioned so many instruments from first-generation tracker-revival builders (Fisk, Andover, Noack, Flentrop, Rieger) that later firms are less well-represented. Richards, Fowkes & Co.’s Opus 10, of 2000, was a welcome addition, a compact and uncompromising essay in a hybrid Dutch-North German style particularly suited to the music of Bach and his forebears. With suspended mechanical key action and Kellner temperament, the organ speaks with resonant authority into a buoyant acoustic. The historically modeled case is as confidently anachronistic in Belluschi’s mid-century church as the church itself is nestled alongside Marlborough Street’s row houses. Three stops prepared in 2000—Vox Humana, Schalmey, Cornet—were installed in 2010 to celebrate the organ’s tenth anniversary.

 

 Richards, Fowkes & Co., Opus 10, 2000

First Church, Cambridge

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First Church, Cambridge

The location of Harvard University was partially determined by the desire for proximity to the original First Church in Cambridge, its congregation gathered in 1636. The Massachusetts Constitution, the world’s oldest in continuous use, was drafted in the fourth meeting house in 1779. Tensions between liberals and conservatives resulted in a split between Unitarian and Congregationalist factions by 1830. The sixth and present red granite structure, by Abel Martin, was dedicated in 1872. Gaze atop the steeple for a glimpse of a gilded rooster weather vane carried from church to church since 1721.

 

When Frobenius installed a twelve-stop organ at Queens College, Oxford in 1962, its elegant case, spare voicing, and obvious craftsmanship inspired a generation of English builders—much as the 1958 Flentrop at the Busch-Reisinger Museum did for New England builders. When the Cambridge Frobenius arrived in 1972, its place in the continuum made it more of a follower than setter of trends. Its logic and polish were immediately evident, however. The multi-flatted case, like sails on a schooner, was by now then Frobenius trademark; the organ itself is meticulously engineered, with pipes planted on the windchests exactly as they appear in the façade. Frobenius returned in 1995 to furnish new stop and combination actions.

 

Th. Frobenius & Sønner, Opus 765, 1972 Th. Frobenius & Sønner, Opus 765, 1972

First Church in Boston

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First Church in Boston

First Church in Boston

Established in 1630 by the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and expanding to Second Church in 1649, this was the church of the Mather family, John Winthrop, Paul Revere, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The two congregations merged in 1970, commissioning Paul Rudolph’s Brutalist building of striated concrete in 1972 after fire destroyed most of an 1867 building by Ware and Van Brunt, architects of Harvard’s Memorial Hall. Outside, a vast copper roof cajoles unity from building elements old and new. A liturgical Cabinet of Dr. Caligari awaits inside, skylights illuminating dramatic angles of every description except right. In 2012, the congregation gave up on Rudolph’s deep outdoor amphitheater—even dead leaves seemed uncomfortable in it—entombing it under a welcome patch of sod. Former organists at First Church include composers Whitney Eugene Thayer and Arthur Foote, and the Chicago-born William E. Zeuch, who joined the Skinner Organ Company in 1917 and worked there until 1955.

 

Modern Movement in appearance and tone, the 1972 Casavant comes from that firm’s second decade of twentieth-century tracker organ construction. Though now under the leadership of Gerhard Brunzema, the stoplist follows a style established in the 1960s by Lawrence Phelps, while the case design recalls the asymmetrical, multi-front style popularized by Frobenius, as seen at First Church, Cambridge.

 

First Church in Boston  Casavant Frères, Opus 3140, 1972

Trinity Church in the City of Boston

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Trinity Church in the City of Boston

Trinity Church in the City of Boston

Forty-five hundred trees pounded into alluvial muck hold up Trinity Church, a perennial presence on the American Institute of Architects’ shortlist of greatest buildings in America. Three men in their thirties made it happen: Phillips Brooks, the charismatic preacher from Philadelphia; architect Henry Hobson Richardson, as yet relatively untried but with sterling Harvard connections; and John La Farge, an artist known only for miniature watercolors. Together they transformed one another and American architecture with a “color church” light years distant from the era’s prevailing vocabulary. Richardson’s Greek-cross plan draws upon Romanesque churches in the Auvergne and the tower of Salamanca Cathedral, familiar to him only through books. La Farge’s mural program was the first in America, hastily completed under grueling winter conditions just in time for the church’s dedication in February 1877. Magnificent stained glass by La Farge, Oudinot, Clayton & Bell, Edward Burne Jones, and William Morris intensify the pervasive glow of Pompeian red. A number of young apprentices launched distinguished careers here, among them Augustus Saint Gaudens, Charles McKim, and Stanford White.

 

Music has formed an integral part of parish life since the arrival of the first organ, in 1744, and the Vestry’s decision, in 1785, to set aside a pew for “such Persons as chuse to set in it who are capable of leading in the Singing.” For a new building all about the progressive, the organ could come only from one builder: Hilborne Roosevelt of New York, famous for stringing a Vox Humana in the air at the 1876 Centennial Exposition and playing it electrically. The choice surely irked Boston builders; bad enough to buy that big concert organ from the Germans in 1863, but now this? Installed in the church’s southeast corner, the Roosevelt reached five stories tall, from water motors in the basement to an Echo in the chancel ceiling. The location muffled the tone, however, not only of the organ but also the singers occupying the same space. Before the building was even a year old, proposals surfaced to relocate all musical forces to the rear gallery.

 

Since then, music has ricocheted around the building. In 1881, organ and choir moved westward to the gallery, the Roosevelt divided on either side of La Farge’s “Christ in Majesty” window, its original stenciled façade incorporated into the asymmetrical array that remains today. In 1902, Trinity acceded to the fashion for vested choirs of men and boys, necessitating a chancel remodeling and, once more, a chancel organ. Built by Hutchings-Votey, the three-manual arrived on the northeast side in 1902. A console linking it with the gallery organ was inaugurated in April 1904.

 

In the 1920s, Ernest Skinner came to Trinity: first in 1924, with a few tonal changes and a towering four-manual console, then in 1926, with a brand-new, fifty-four-voice gallery organ. Louis Vierne singled it out for praise after a recital in April 1927. When the chancel was renovated again, in 1938, Ernest Skinner & Son made several tonal changes to both instruments. The 1926 thirty-two-foot Bombarde was switched out for a Fagotto, allowing Mr. Skinner to recycle the pipes into his organ for Washington National Cathedral.

 

Since then, the Trinity organs have tacked an American Classic course. The three-manual console Aeolian-Skinner provided in 1956 was a compact retort to its lofty predecessor. A new Aeolian-Skinner chancel organ arrived in 1960. Over the next decade, Skinner-trained technician Jason McKown refashioned the sound of both organs in collaboration with George Faxon, Trinity’s organist from 1954 to 1980. The gallery received a new Great flue chorus and Swell and Pedal chorus reeds from Aeolian-Skinner, while the chancel organ became more homogenous and less aggressive. The copper trumpet beneath the west window was added in 1987; voiced initially by Jack Steinkampf, it was later mellowed by David Broome. This is Boston’s most oft-heard pipe organ: three times each Sunday, weekly Wednesday evensong, and weekly Friday recitals.

 

Skinner Organ Company, Opus 573, 1926 Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co., Opus 573-C, 1961

Skinner Organ Company, Opus 573, 1926
Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co., Opus 573-C, 1961

 

Skinner Organ Company, Opus 573, 1926

Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co., Opus 573-C, 1961
 

Symphony Hall

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Symphony Hall

Symphony Hall

Harvard acoustician Wallace Sabine’s stroke of genius at Symphony Hall was to veto Charles McKim’s original design for a wide, semicircular amphitheater, opting instead to copy successful European halls. The triumphant result is a steel, brick, and plaster shoebox sixty-one feet high, seventy-five feet wide, and 125 feet long, whose neoclassical coffers and crannies distribute sound with uncanny richness. As at Vienna and Amsterdam, the orchestra sits in the room itself with minimal interference from proscenium or balconies. Up to 2,625 attend each concert during the Boston Symphony Orchestra season, reduced to 2,370 for summer and holiday Pops, when tables, chairs, and waiter service replace the orchestra seating. Listen for the original leather seat bottoms dropping noisily during quiet moments, just as they have since 1900. Bostonians have their hall and wouldn’t change a hair on its head, although the skimpy public areas (sacrificed to the acoustic shoebox concept) have been redecorated frequently with varying degrees of success. When the stage floor was replaced in 2006, the original hand-forged nails were carefully replicated.

 

Having recently completed the organ for the Mission Church, in 1897, and many other distinctive instruments along the Northeast Corridor, George S. Hutchings was at a peak when his firm built the three-manual organ for Symphony Hall in 1900. If this organ had a defining characteristic, it was surely the Pedal, containing not only an ample thirty-two-foot wood Diapason but also a Trombone on fifteen-inch pressure. Over the next fifty years, fashion bypassed Hutchings’ essentially conservative scheme. What proved insufficiently orchestral for the 1910s and ’20s became too heavy and Romantic for the ’30s and ’40s.

 

E. Power Biggs became the champion for a new Aeolian-Skinner of leaner aesthetic. It arrived in 1950 to mark three events: the Hall’s fiftieth anniversary, the bicentennial of the death of J.S. Bach (including a visit from Albert Schweitzer), and the 1950 American Guild of Organists National Convention. Hutchings’ thirty-two-foot diapason was chopped up and replaced with a slender thirty-two-foot Violone, along with a reedless Great, unenclosed Positiv, and capping Bombarde division. The organ gained fame perhaps less through recitals than through recordings, by Biggs, Pierre Cochereau, and Virgil Fox. The Foley-Baker, Inc. rebuild of 2004 sought to reframe the instrument in a world that had seen enormous changes in the sonic heft of concert-hall organs: the Fisk in Dallas, the Dobson in Philadelphia, the Glatter-Götz/Rosales in Los Angeles. Two additional thirty-two-foot registers, Diapason and Bourdon, were incorporated. The Positiv was eliminated, the Bombarde strengthened, and several foundation registers added as the Choir became a Solo. While the organ has yet to be heard in recital, it is used often in orchestral performances.

 

Symphony Hall

Symphony Hall

 

Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co., Opus 1134, 1949

Foley-Baker, Inc. 2004