Boogie-Woogie for Organ

At the great monastery of El Escorial near Madrid, in the mid-1700s, a young Spanish priest named Antonio Soler used to teach music to His Most Serene Highness the Infante of Spain, Don Gabriel de Borbon. For the Infante's further diversion, Father Soler specially composed six sprightly duo-organ concertos. At their first U.S. performance last week, by Organist E. Power Biggs and Composer-Harpsichordist Daniel Pinkham, the concertos proved just as happily diverting to a modern audience as they must have been in Don Gabriel's day.

For the concert, Harvard University's Busch-Reisinger Museum provided its new Dutch-built Flentrop tracker organ, the only one in the U.S. designed for concert purposes. Because the tracker organ operates by direct key-to-valve action, it avoids the breathy sonorities of electrically controlled organs, has an articulate, percussive quality well suited to the rapid trills and runs of 18th century organ style. With Biggs playing the Flentrop and Pinkham * operating a smaller 18th century organ moved in especially for the occasion, the concert unfolded as a gaily trip-hammered dialogue in which one instrument occasionally laid down the theme, then fell back to let the other one elaborate. Most of the time the two organs sounded together, but there was one passage where they called back and forth to each other like two playful boys. Each concerto ended with a sprightly minuet of such infectious gaiety that the dignified audience smiled or broke into surprised laughter. Glowed Organist Biggs: "It's a kind of classical boogie-woogie."

*Great-grandson of Patent Medicinist Lydia Pinkham.

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