United States Various, ‘A Keyboard Extravaganza for Organs and Piano’: David Briggs, Jeremy Filsell, Wayne Marshall (organ / piano). Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, New York, 27.1.2024. (RP)

Jean Langlais – ‘Esquisse Gothique’ No.1 (‘Veni Creator’)
Mozart – Fantasia in F minor, KV 594
Rachmaninoff – ‘How Lovely’, Op.21 No.7 (transcr. Filsell); ‘Spring Waters’, Op.14 No.11 (transcr. Francis Pott)
Pierre Cochereau – ‘Toccata’ (from Symphonie Improvisée, Boston 1956) (transcr. Filsell); ‘Berceuse à la mémoire de Louis Vierne’ (transcr. Briggs)
David Briggs – Boléro for Two Organs and Piano (world premiere)
Jehan Alain – ‘Litanies’, JA 119
Wayne Marshall – ‘Berceuse’
Bach – Improvisations on Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565
Concerts at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue generally feature its renowned chorus of men and boys, but this was a celebration of its magnificent organs and a Steinway concert grand piano of impressive pedigree. Jeremy Filsell, Organist and Choirmaster at St. Thomas was joined by two equally accomplished colleagues, David Briggs and Wayne Marshall, in what was aptly billed as a ‘Keyboard Extravaganza’.
Briggs, currently Artist in Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, recalled first meeting Filsell as a boy at Coventry Cathedral in England. He reminisced about the last time they performed together some 25 years ago on adjacent pontoon boats on a lake at the Lahti International Organ Festival. They needed to don sunglasses – the sun was still shining brightly at nine on that summer evening – and the blast of a passing ferry’s horn added a nautical atmosphere to the event.
Marshall is equally famous as a conductor, organist and pianist, and performs in churches and in concert halls. Briggs remembered encountering Marshall at King’s College, Cambridge, when they were about eighteen. Marshall’s virtuosity was readily apparent, and the young Briggs was astonished at how fast he could play.
St. Thomas’s main instrument is the Miller-Scott Organ, built by the Dobson Organ Company, which was dedicated in 2018. It has 7,069 pipes over six divisions and 102 stops, and was conceived by John Scott, the church’s former Organist and Director of Music, who died suddenly in 2015. Scott envisioned it as being suitable for the entire range of music from Baroque to Modern, and this concert put its versatility to the test.
In the rear of the church is the Loening-Hancock Gallery Organ with its gilded oak case and stunning cobalt-blue doors. Built in 1996 by Taylor & Boody, it was enhanced in 2015 to its current state with three manuals, 31 stops and 44 ranks. Dedicated to the late Gerre Hancock in honor of his 25 years of service to the church as organist and choirmaster, the instrument was inspired by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century organs in the Netherlands and Northern Germany. Its authenticity extends to three large bellows that can be operated by foot.
In 2021, St. Thomas was given a Steinway & Sons full-concert grand piano that had been the personal instrument of Eugene Istomin, the late American pianist. Its prior owners, California vintners Mark Nelson and Dana Johnson, wished to find a place that would both treasure and use the instrument. St. Thomas was their choice, and Filsell displayed its exceptional tonal qualities in transcriptions of two Rachmaninoff songs.
The concert opened with a two-organ version of Jean Langlais’s ‘Esquisse Gothique’ No.1. Briggs, who studied with Langlais, was seated at one of the church’s latest acquisitions, the Karl and Barbara Saunders Organ Console (the original keydesk of the Miller-Scott, recently converted to a mobile one). It is directly in front of the chancel, and Marshall was perched high above in the rear of the church. The distinct sounds of the two instruments captured the tonal contrasts of the work, with the tinkling sounds of rear organ’s Zimbelstern heard in the glorious closing measures.
The Loening-Hancock was heard in the repertoire for which it was intended, with Briggs playing Mozart’s F minor Fantasia. The work was intended for a mechanical organ clock in the mausoleum of an Austrian field marshal. In Briggs’s interpretation, the elegiac mood of the work yielded to sparkle and precision.4

The concert also saw the world premiere of Briggs’s Boléro for Two Organs and Piano. Briggs said that he composed it in about two days with most of the work done in London Heathrow’s Admirals Club or in Seat 17A on the subsequent flight to New York’s JFK Airport. It is Briggs’s first work to utilize twelve-tone techniques. The sequence that he devised uses every half-step interval in an octave, and it is heard in its entirety in a solo clarinet stop at the beginning of the work.
Briggs found fame early in his career with transcriptions of recordings of improvisations by Pierre Cochereau, who was titular organist of Notre-Dame de Paris from 1955 until his death in 1984. Filsell has also transcribed the French organist’s improvisations, and Marshall gave a rhythmically charged and joyous performance of Cochereau’s Toccata from his Symphonie Improvisée, which the French organist recorded live in Boston’s Symphony Hall in 1956. Far more soothing and melodic was Briggs’s playing of his own transcription of ‘Berceuse à la mémoire de Louis Vierne’, with particularly lovely melodies sounding in the solo flute stop.
Filsell explored the tonal glories of the Miller-Scott Organ in Jehan Alain’s ‘Litanies’. Alain, who was killed in action in the final days of World War II, wrote that an organist must overwhelm in the piece, yielding entirely to the passionate emotion of the work. Filsell seemed buoyed by the glorious sounds that he drew from the organ, and the listener was left exhilarated by the experience.
After the Alain, to ‘calm things down a bit’, Marshall played his ‘Berceuse’, which started out as an improvisation that he did at England’s York Minster. The work was jazzy but light, and revealed the inviting, lush sounds to be drawn from the Miller-Scott Organ.
This wonderful concert ended with Filsell at the piano, Marshall on the main organ and Briggs in the gallery improvising on Bach’s ever-popular Toccata and Fugue in D minor. It was three colleagues and friends at the top of their form displaying their virtuosity and showmanship.
St. Thomas Church had promised a musical extravaganza, and these three superb organists delivered one.
Rick Perdian
Featured Image: Jeremy Fiilsell at the Loening-Hancock Gallery Organ © St. Thomas Fifth Avenue