Your regular organist doesn’t necessarily have a masseuse standing in the wings. But Calvin Bowman needs one since he’ll be playing an epic 16-hour concert at Brisbane Festival.
So, if you’re a fan of organ music and Bach, in particular, put September 13 in your diary for The Complete Bach Catalogue for Organ.
Bowman will be playing the magnificent 6780-pipe organ crafted by the renowned Johannes Klais Orgelbau of Bonn, Germany. Built over three years and completed in 1987, this instrument is a marvel of both scale and sound and is rarely heard in recital.
It should be heard more, so Bowman is doing his bit to change that with a Ring Cycle-length concert in QPAC‘s Concert Hall, home of the organ in question.
“I will be playing for 16 hours all up with little breaks in between,” he tells me.
“That’s mad,” I respond, but he insists it is “good mad”.
“The music I will be playing is wonderful and it’s music that a lot of people don’t know,” he says. “It’ll be nice and people can come and go as they please.”
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And here’s the thing – it’s a free gig. You will hear a renowned Australian organist playing the complete organ works of Johann Sebastian Bach – music that underpins the very foundations of the organ repertoire. From intimate chorale preludes shaped by Bach’s deep spirituality to dazzling preludes and fugues that display his unmatched craftsmanship, each work reveals a different facet of his genius.
he will be giving it a red hot go all day and into the night
Spanning music written for worship, celebration and virtuosic display, the series brings together familiar masterpieces and rarely heard gems, offering a richly layered portrait of Bach at the keyboard.
At its centre is the magnificent pipe organ that presides over the Concert Hall, an instrument capable of the most delicate whisper and overwhelming power in equal measure.
“It’s a very fine instrument,” Bowman says. “It’s not used much.”
But he will be giving it a red hot go all day and into the night. It’s an event that fits very well into Brisbane Festival artistic director Ebony Bott’s philosophy of creating a festival that lasts from dawn to quite late. No other events at Brisbane Festival fill in all that time, though, so this will be special.
Bowman is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and the first Australian to graduate with a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Yale University, with the assistance of a Fulbright scholarship.
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He is a former senior lecturer in composition and university organist at The Australian National University. He is much in demand as a soloist, accompanist and chamber musician.
An especial love of the music of J.S. Bach led to his performances of the complete Bach organ works twice in public – once in 1995 and then again in 2009 for the Melbourne International Festival where he performed them in a single 17-hour sitting. For the latter feat he was nominated for a Helpmann Award.
“I also played this 16-hour concert at Dark Mofo (in Hobart) four or five years ago,” he says.
In 2001, he was granted the privilege of re-opening the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ, following its multi-million-dollar restoration, by presenting the world première performance of Voices by Philip Glass in the composer’s presence.
As keyboardist he has also premièred works by Peter Sculthorpe, Ross Edwards, Richard Mills, Graeme Koehne, Andrew Schultz and others, and appeared as soloist with many of the major Australian orchestras, including regular appearances with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ as part of their Melbourne Town Hall series.
Nowadays Bowman describes himself as a “freelance musician” and says that playing the organ is “a vocation”. Of course, a lot of the time he goes to play where the organs are and that means churches, big and small.
He is the resident organist and director of music at St Andrew’s Anglican Church, Brighton, in Melbourne, where he plays the church’s famous 1964 War Memorial Grand Organ.
Playing QPAC’s organ all day long will mean short breaks are important, but he says they will be very short.
“Because I don’t want to lose momentum,” he says. “There are times when I will need that massage. My hands will be fine but it’s the muscles in the upper back that will need attention.”
Fair enough.
The Complete Bach Catalogue for Organ featuring Calvin Bowman, September 13, from 6am, Concert Hall, QPAC. Free event.
brisbanefestival.com.au/events/the-complete-bach-catalogue-for-organ
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