Organ: The King of Instruments - 92Y, New York
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School of Music

Organ: The King of Instruments

Online Class

Pipe organs are massive and dominate the space they’re in — but the people who play them are often hidden.

92Y School of Music and host Naomi Lewin present a conversation for organ aficionados, and for anyone who’s ever wondered how to handle such an enormous beast. Lewin, the former weekday afternoon host on WQXR, will speak with four great organists: GRAMMY Award-winner Paul Jacobs, Chair of the Organ Department at The Juilliard School; David Hurd, Director of Music at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, and former professor at General Theological Seminary; Rachel Laurin, former Titular Organist at Notre Dame Cathedral in Ottawa, now primarily composer; and Greg Zelek, Principal Organist of the Madison Symphony Orchestra in Wisconsin.

Upcoming Performances:

Greg Zelek

Fri, Jan 29
Organ Soloist with Jacksonville Symphony Brass, Organ, Winds and Percussion Concert

Fri and Sat, Mar 19 and 20
Organ Soloist for Rheinberger's 2nd Organ Concerto with The Jacksonville Symphony

Sat, Apr 10
Organ and Cello Concert with Cellist Thomas Mesa at Longwood Gardens

Paul Jacobs

A New Century, "Okeanos" with Cleveland Orchestra; Franz Welser Most, conductor

Thu, Apr 29 through May 6
Poulenc Organ Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

Programs taking place online:
An access link will be emailed to you after purchase.

Programs taking place in our NYC facilities:
Please read our safety guidelines before visiting our building.

Programs taking place online and in our NYC facilities:
Please select which experience you wish to participate in when registering. Online participants will be emailed an access link after purchase. In-person participants should read our safety guidelines before attending the program.

Instructors

Naomi Lewin

Naomi Lewin is the former host of weekday afternoon music on WQXR, and of the podcast Conducting Business. Before that, she was midday host at WGUC in Cincinnati, where she created the award-winning weekly program Classics for Kids, which airs on radio stations across the country. She has produced music programs and arts reports for NPR; intermission features for Metropolitan Opera broadcasts; and podcasts on subjects ranging from the Yale Glee Club, to Tippet Rise Art Center, to the bicentennial of St. George's Choral Society. Südwestrundfunk in Stuttgart recently com ...

Naomi Lewin

Naomi Lewin is the former host of weekday afternoon music on WQXR, and of the podcast Conducting Business. Before that, she was midday host at WGUC in Cincinnati, where she created the award-winning weekly program Classics for Kids, which airs on radio stations across the country. She has produced music programs and arts reports for NPR; intermission features for Metropolitan Opera broadcasts; and podcasts on subjects ranging from the Yale Glee Club, to Tippet Rise Art Center, to the bicentennial of St. George's Choral Society. Südwestrundfunk in Stuttgart recently commissioned her to create a two-hour program – in German – celebrating Itzhak Perlman's 75th birthday. Naomi is also a speaker, emcee, and media coach, and the radio voice of Arizona Opera.

Given her previous lifetime as a singer and actress, Naomi has continued to appear onstage, narrating Peter and the Wolf, Carnival of the Animals, King David, Façade, A Visit from the White Rabbit, and Four Seasons of Italian Futurist Cuisine by Aaron Jay Kernis. She can be seen as J.S. Bach in the Sunday Baroque 30th Anniversary video, and as a spitball-shooting professor in La Folía, from Filmelodic. Naomi has hosted a Classics for Kids Live show around the country, and has given talks on operas from Aida to Zauberflöte.

Naomi was born in Princeton, New Jersey, but received both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale.

Paul Jacobs

Heralded as “one of the major musicians of our time” by Alex Ross of The New Yorker and as “America’s leading organ performer” by The Economist, the internationally celebrated organist Paul Jacobs combines a probing intellect and extraordinary technical mastery with an unusually large repertoire, both old and new. He has performed to great critical acclaim on five continents and in each of the fifty United States. The only organist ever to have won a Grammy Award—in 2011 for Messiaen’s towering “Livre du Saint-Sacrément,&r ...

Paul Jacobs

Heralded as “one of the major musicians of our time” by Alex Ross of The New Yorker and as “America’s leading organ performer” by The Economist, the internationally celebrated organist Paul Jacobs combines a probing intellect and extraordinary technical mastery with an unusually large repertoire, both old and new. He has performed to great critical acclaim on five continents and in each of the fifty United States. The only organist ever to have won a Grammy Award—in 2011 for Messiaen’s towering “Livre du Saint-Sacrément,”—Mr. Jacobs is an eloquent champion of his instrument both in the United States and abroad.

Mr. Jacobs has transfixed audiences, colleagues, and critics alike with landmark performances of the complete works for solo organ by J.S. Bach and Messiaen. 20 years ago, he made musical history at age 23 when he gave an 18-hour marathon performance of Bach’s complete organ works on the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death. A fierce advocate of new music, Mr. Jacobs has premiered works by Samuel Adler, Mason Bates, Michael Daugherty, Bernd Richard Deutsch, John Harbison, Wayne Oquin, Stephen Paulus, Christopher Theofanidis, and Christopher Rouse, among others. As a teacher he has also been a vocal proponent of the redeeming nature of traditional and contemporary classical music.

No other organist is repeatedly invited as soloist to perform with prestigious orchestras, thus making him a pioneer in the movement for the revival of symphonic music featuring the organ. Mr. Jacobs regularly appears with the Chicago Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Edmonton Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Montreal Symphony, Nashville Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Pacific Symphony, Phoenix Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Toledo Symphony, and Utah Symphony, among others.

Mr. Jacobs studied at the Curtis Institute of Music with organist John Weaver and harpsichordist Lionel Party, and at Yale University with Thomas Murray. He joined the faculty of The Juilliard School in 2003, and was named chairman of the organ department in 2004, one of the youngest faculty appointees in the school’s history. He received Juilliard’s prestigious William Schuman Scholar’s Chair in 2007. In 2017 he received an honorary doctorate from Washington and Jefferson College.

This instructor is currently teaching the following classes:

Organ: The King of Instruments


David Hurd

David Hurd is widely recognized as one of the foremost church musicians and concert organists in the United States, with a long list of awards, prizes, honors, and achievements, and immeasurable expertise in organ performance, improvisation, and composition. From 1976 until 2015, David Hurd was a faculty member at The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City, first as Director of Chapel Music and later also as Professor of Church Music and Organist. For his work at The General Theological Seminary and for his substantial contribution to church music, four other ...

David Hurd

David Hurd is widely recognized as one of the foremost church musicians and concert organists in the United States, with a long list of awards, prizes, honors, and achievements, and immeasurable expertise in organ performance, improvisation, and composition. From 1976 until 2015, David Hurd was a faculty member at The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City, first as Director of Chapel Music and later also as Professor of Church Music and Organist. For his work at The General Theological Seminary and for his substantial contribution to church music, four other seminaries awarded him honorary doctorates. He is the composer of dozens of hymns, choral works, settings of the liturgy, and organ works published by a number of major houses. He was one of the major contributors of new hymnody and liturgical settings for the Episcopal Church’s Hymnal 1982 and his music is seen in hymnals and choir libraries in churches of all religious denominations. In 2010 he became the fifteenth recipient of The American Guild of Organists’ Distinguished Composer Award. From 1998-2013 he was Music Director and Organist at Church of the Holy Apostles (Episcopal) in New York City. In May 2016, Dr. Hurd was appointed Organist and Music Director of the famed Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Times Square.

As a concert organist David Hurd enjoys instant recognition both at home and abroad. Since winning both first prizes (in performance and improvisation) of the 1977 International Congress of Organists, he has performed throughout North America and Europe, has been a featured artist at numerous national and regional conventions of the American Guild of Organists. He was invited to perform at the Internationaal Orgelfestival Haarlem, during which he received the diploma for improvisation at the Stitchting Internationaal Orgelconcours.

He studied both at the Preparatory Division of the Juilliard School and at Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art. Later he attended Oberlin College in Ohio, graduating with a music degree in 1971, and went on for further study at the University of North Carolina and, back in New York, at the Manhattan School of Music. His organ teachers have included Bronson Ragan, Garth Peacock, Arthur Poister, and Rudolph Kremer.

David Hurd is represented exclusively in North America by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists, LLC.

This instructor is currently teaching the following classes:

Organ: The King of Instruments


Rachel Laurin

Rachel Laurin leads a dual international career as a concert organist and a very prolific composer. She devotes herself to composition, recitals, master-classes and lectures.

She has performed organ recitals in major cities in Canada, the United States and Europe, and has made more than twelve recordings, including two CDs devoted to her own compositions. She is frequently invited as a recitalist, composer, lecturer and teacher, in Canadian and American universities. She visited among others Yale University (twice as Distinguished Guest Artist), Baylor University, University ...

Rachel Laurin

Rachel Laurin leads a dual international career as a concert organist and a very prolific composer. She devotes herself to composition, recitals, master-classes and lectures.

She has performed organ recitals in major cities in Canada, the United States and Europe, and has made more than twelve recordings, including two CDs devoted to her own compositions. She is frequently invited as a recitalist, composer, lecturer and teacher, in Canadian and American universities. She visited among others Yale University (twice as Distinguished Guest Artist), Baylor University, University of Houston, Syracuse University, Kansas City University, St. Thomas University, Mount Royal College, University of Alberta, etc.
Rachel Laurin has served as “house composer” at Leupold Editions since 2006. She has composed more than a hundred works for various solo instruments, voice, instrumental ensembles, choir, and orchestra. Most of her compositions are published and recognized internationally, having been performed and recorded on the five continents. Composing almost exclusively on commissions, recent Premieres of her works include the Concert Piece No.4, “Sweelinck Variations”, Op.96, commissioned and performed by Thomas Trotter at the Birmingham Symphony Hall, UK, (February 2020), the “Cantabile à Deux”, Op.99 by the Chenault Duo (Elizabeth and Raymond Chenault), in Atlanta, Georgia, (April 2020) and the Concert Piece No.3, “Mr. Mistoffelees Overture”, Op.95, performed by Alan Morrison during the American Guild of Organists online Organfest 2020, where she also received the AGO “Distinguished Composer Award” 2020, in recognition of her important contribution to the organ repertoire, as a composer.

She has won many prestigious awards, including the Holtkamp-AGO Composition Award in 2008, First Prize in the 2009 Marilyn Mason New Organ Music Competition, the First Prize at the Orgelkids Tenth Anniversary Composition Contest (2019) in Netherlands, in the category for Do-Organ Solo, and more recently she was selected as the commissioned composer for the Pogorzelski-Yankee Composition Competition 2022. Her works are published by Doberman, Éditions du Nouveau Théâtre Musical, RCCO Music Publications (Canada), Europart (France), Hinshaw Music/Fred Bock, and  Leupold Editions, a division of the Leupold Foundation (USA).

Rachel Laurin is a member of the “Comité d’Honneur de la Fédération Francophone des Amis de l’Orgue” (FFAO) since 2016.

For more informations, visit www.rachellaurin.com
 

This instructor is currently teaching the following classes:

Organ: The King of Instruments


Greg Zelek

Praised as “extraordinary in the classical music world” (Jon Hornbacher, PBS Wisconsin Life) and a “musical star” (Bill Wineke, Channel 3000), Greg Zelek is the Principal Organist of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the Elaine and Nicholas Mischler Curator of the Overture Concert Organ Series. 

Greg concertizes with the Madison Symphony Orchestra and throughout the United States. In addition, he regularly performs with orchestras as both a soloist and professional ensemble member. Performances throughout the 2020-21 season include a concert from Over ...

Greg Zelek

Praised as “extraordinary in the classical music world” (Jon Hornbacher, PBS Wisconsin Life) and a “musical star” (Bill Wineke, Channel 3000), Greg Zelek is the Principal Organist of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the Elaine and Nicholas Mischler Curator of the Overture Concert Organ Series. 

Greg concertizes with the Madison Symphony Orchestra and throughout the United States. In addition, he regularly performs with orchestras as both a soloist and professional ensemble member. Performances throughout the 2020-21 season include a concert from Overture Hall in Madison, WI, a virtual performance for the MET Museum in NYC, a streamed Christmas Concert for the Madison Symphony Orchestra, as well as a performance with the Jacksonville Symphony Brass, Winds, and Percussion ensemble and Rheinberger's Second Organ Concerto with the Jacksonville Symphony in January and March 2021, respectively. Highlights of this past 2019-20 season included three performances of Barber’s Toccata Festiva with the Madison Symphony Orchestra, recitals at the Oregon Bach Festival and the Kimmel Center in Verizon Hall, a return appearance with the Jacksonville Symphony as the featured guest soloist, as well as performances at venues in Virginia, Florida, Colorado, and Kentucky. Greg also collaborated in a number of concerts with fellow Juilliard alum and cellist Thomas Mesa. He has performed with the Florida Orchestra, was the featured guest soloist with the Ridgewood Symphony, and was the organist in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2014 production of Faust. He also performed twice that year with the New World Symphony, including in a performance of Lukas Foss’s Phorion conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. In 2012, Greg played Strauss’s Alpine Symphony with the MET Orchestra in Carnegie Hall conducted by Semyon Bychkov and performed Poulenc’s Organ Concerto with the Miami Symphony Orchestra in 2011.

In 2016, Greg was chosen by The Diapason magazine as one of the top “20 Under 30” organists, a feature which selects the most successful young artists in the field. He was the First Prize winner in the 2012 Rodgers North American Classical Organ Competition, the 2012 West Chester University Organ Competition, and the 2010 East Carolina University Organ Competition (where he was also awarded the “Bach Prize”). Greg was selected as a 2010 NFAA YoungArts Silver Medal Winner and was a prizewinner in the Albert Schweitzer Organ Festival. Most recently, Greg was the Audience Prize winner and finalist in the 2016 Longwood Gardens International Organ Competition.

A recipient of the inaugural Kovner Fellowship, Greg received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, as well as an Artist Diploma, from the Juilliard School as a student of Paul Jacobs. Before moving to Madison, Greg was most recently the Music Director and Organist at the Episcopal Church of St. Matthew and St. Timothy in New York City. A Cuban-American and native Spanish speaker from Miami, FL, Greg became the Music Director and Organist of Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Miami at age 15, and has served as the summer organist for San Pedro Apostol Church in Ramales de la Victoria, Spain.
 

This instructor is currently teaching the following classes:

Organ: The King of Instruments


Please note that all 92Y regularly scheduled in-person programs are suspended.