Andrew Arthur Organ Recital

by

Rudolf Schroeter

 

On a gorgeous Carmel morning, in the satisfying acoustics of the Mission Basilica, gifted young Andrew Arthur’s skilled hands and feet played the 1986 Casavant organ and in so doing presided over a meeting of three worlds —  the world of Bach: willing to give glory to God, and creating beauty to satisfy the soul; the world of Mozart: making mankind the measure of all things, and celebrating reason while seeking beauty to please the senses; and finally the world of our society: making self the center of all things, and demanding its entertainment, often at the expense of beauty.

Andrew Arthur is a child of our world, yet played Bach and Mozart with enough understanding of their worlds to hold a large audience, of that third world, enraptured. He opened with an  impressive reading of a relentlessly energetic Bach Prelude & Fugue (BWV 541), and followed this display of ordered strength with three of the six Schübler Chorales (BWV 645/650), each a marvel of  Bach’s genius for giving unexpected beauty and complexity to basically simple tunes.  

Mozart was a renowned organist since his early youth, but wrote nothing original for what he himself called “the king of instruments,” composing one piece for harmonica and three  for mechanical organ yet, as only he could, imbuing them with rich musical content. Separating them dramatically from each other by the remaining three Schübler chorales, Arthur played two of them, the Adagio & Allegro K594 and the Andante K.616, each transcribed and edited by him. The two pieces are in stark contrast to each other -  the Adagio & Allegro virtually operatic, the Andante almost carelessly playful  -  and in their relative lack of complexity & order quite a world apart from what we had heard of  Bach. 

Arthur ended with Bach’s Toccata, Adagio & Fugue (BWV 564) and presented us with both disappointment and soul-warming beauty:  He neither elicited the spirit nor delineated  the architecture of the Toccata, but spoke to every listening heart with his rendition of the unforgettable Adagio. The audience’s spirited applause was his well-deserved reward.

 [Guest reviewer Rudolf Schroeter is a gifted amateur pianist and a member of the board of directors of the Mozart Society of California and the Carmel Music Society]

End