There is something about the sound of a pipe organ filling a great cathedral that no recording quite captures.
Often called the king of instruments, the organ can whisper like a flute one moment and shake the floor the next, and few buildings in Perth show it off as well as St Mary’s.
Over four Sunday afternoons between August and November, audiences will have the chance to hear it for themselves, as the Cathedral presents a new Organ Concert Series built around one of Western Australia’s finest instruments.
The line-up brings together a distinguished visitor and the Cathedral’s own musicians, with programs that run from Baroque masterworks to music written only a few years ago.
The series opens on Sunday 9 August at 2.30pm with Simon Niemiński, Assistant Director of Music at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney.
London-born and trained at the Royal College of Music, Cambridge and York Minster, he has recorded thirteen solo albums and been heard on BBC Radio and American broadcasts; Organists’ Review once called his playing “utterly convincing.”
His Perth program travels widely, from Bach and a stirring setting of the spiritual Go Down Moses to Max Reger’s ferocious Symphonic Fantasia and Fugue, ‘The Inferno’, taking in his own arrangement of Korngold’s Marietta’s Lute Song along the way.
It also carries a local thread: two works by C. Edgar Ford, Organist of St Mary’s Cathedral, Perth, from 1941 to 1961.
On Sunday 20 September, the program takes an unexpected turn.
Recently appointed Master of Music Dominic Perissinotto joins one of Australia’s most sought-after saxophonists, Matthew Styles, for an afternoon of music for organ and saxophone.
The two bring plenty between them: Styles, a Churchill Fellow and Doctor of Music, has shared stages with Ben Folds and Olivia Newton-John, while Perissinotto spent more than two decades building audiences for the organ at St Patrick’s Basilica, Fremantle, through his long-running Pipe Organ Plus series.
Their program moves from Milhaud’s playful Scaramouche and Mozart to Charles Ives’s cheeky Variations on America and the ever-popular Albinoni Adagio.
Perth’s own Holly Broadbent, Principal Organist at St Mary’s Cathedral, takes the console on Sunday 8 November.
Recently returned from Yale University, where she studied with James O’Donnell and won two prizes for organ performance, Broadbent is also a composer in her own right.
Her program leans towards the French tradition and the present day, reaching from Charles Tournemire and Nadia Boulanger to living composers Pamela Decker and Ghislaine Reece-Trapp, and closing with Maurice Duruflé’s radiant meditation on the Veni Creator.
The series ends on Sunday 29 November at 2pm with a concert by students of the St Mary’s Cathedral Junior Organ School – a first public platform for several young players, and free to attend.
Each recital begins in the early afternoon, making for an easy Sunday outing in the heart of the city, and the programs are pitched to reward newcomers and seasoned listeners alike.
Tickets start at $20, with concession and under-25 pricing available. Bookings can be made at trybooking.com/DNIWX.
Whether you have loved organ music for years or have never heard the pipes in full voice, there is a seat waiting for you at St Mary’s.