United States Various: Kent Tritle (organ). The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York, 4.2.2025. (RP)
Bach – Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565
Messiaen – ‘Apparition de l’église éternelle’
Rachel Laurin – ‘Berceuse à Pierre’, Op.61
Franck – ‘Pièce héroïque’
Crumb – ‘Pastoral Dream’
Charles Marie Widor – Organ Symphony No.6, Op.42 No.2
When Kent Tritle appeared at the console of the Great Organ in The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine to begin this recital, the line of people waiting to gain admission ran outside along Amsterdam Avenue and around the corner. It was a free concert, but that wasn’t what prompted people to brave the weather on a cold and wet February evening.
Tritle is St. John the Divine’s Director of Cathedral Music & Organist, in addition to organist of the New York Philharmonic and the American Symphony Orchestra. Many were there to hear a master organist play great music, but another factor was that New Yorkers like a survivor. St. John the Divine, which is over 125 years old and the sixth largest Gothic cathedral in the world, and its magnificent Great Organ are just that.
The Cathedral was damaged by fire in 2001 and 2019. The latter occurred on Palm Sunday, the day before a devastating fire broke out at Notre Dame in Paris. The COVID-19 pandemic delayed restoration work on the Great Organ, which only returned to service on 1 December 2024. Tritle’s recital was the first of three scheduled in February to celebrate the organ’s rededication.
The Great Organ is one of the masterpieces of American pipe organs. Originally constructed by the Ernest M. Skinner Company in 1910, it was rebuilt and enlarged by G. Donald Harrison of Aeolian-Skinner in 1954. Born in England, Harrison designed some of the finest and largest pipe organs in the US. The Cathedral’s Great Organ is a four-manual and pedal, seven-division electro-pneumatic action instrument with 151 ranks and 8,514 pipes.
To demonstrate the tonal brilliance and power of the newly restored organ, Tritle programmed some of the most popular works in the repertoire, beginning with Bach’s Toccata and Fuge in D minor. Its opening measures are some of the most recognizable music in the world. Tritle performed the Bach in grand style with immaculate articulation and total control of dynamics.
If Bach offered the comfort of the familiar, Tritle’s performance of Messiaen’s ‘Apparition de l’église éternelle’ captured the ecstasy and terror of the unimaginable – a fleeting glimpse of the divine. Tritle’s imagination took flight in dazzling combinations of sound from tremulous, tender tones to primeval slabs of sound moving at a glacial pace. Pinpoint-accurate pedal work and crashing, massive chords evoked the awe of Messiaen’s realization of a face-to-face encounter with the Almighty.
Tritle explored the organ’s more subtle tonal capabilities in Rachel Laurin’s ‘Berceuse à Pierre’ composed as a gift for the birth of a godson. The sounds ranged from a lovely melody in a solo flute stop to the shimmering tones of strings and céleste in the swell, over a sensitively played two-note ostinato figure in the pedal.
With Franck’s ‘Pièce héroïque’, Tritle turned to the sonic grandeur of the late-French Romantic school. Franck composed the piece in 1878 to be performed on a Cavaillé-Coll organ in the Trocadéro, an enormous festival hall built for the Universal Exposition in Paris. It was not the largest organ in France, but the first concert organ in the country.
In the Franck, Tritle created tension through the wonderfully complex sounds he pulled from the organ’s sound toolbox. There were delicate, lyrical passages, but the dark, dramatic, turbulent ones were wondrous, topped by an even more impressive triumphal ending.
Conceived as an evocation of ancient, open-air music, ‘Pastoral Dream’ is George Crumb’s only composition for solo organ. He described its relentless pedal rumblings, strident rhythms and ear-slitting dynamic level as a ‘colossal musette’, or a very large bagpipe. Loud was the easy part, but it was the clarity of the thirty-second-note passages coursing through the piece that revealed Tritle’s command of the instrument.
The final work was a return to the grand French style with Charles Marie Widor’s Organ Symphony No.6. Like Franck’s ‘Pièce héroïque’, it was composed for the Cavaillé-Coll organ in the Trocadéro. The symphony is constructed in a five-movement arc, with two lyrical movements sandwiched between three fast and vigorous ones.
As with the Crumb, it was not only the boldness and brilliance of Tritle’s playing in the Widor that impressed. There was much else to appreciate, including the fleetness of his fingering in the streams of triplets in the opening Allegro, and the sensitive combination of string sounds in the Adagio. In the Finale, Tritle generated an almost unbearable sense of anticipation in the repeated martial figure that pervades the movement, ultimately released in a glorious G-major chord that brought those gathered to their feet.
Rick Perdian
Featured Image: Console of the Great Organ © St. John the Divine