An Organ — and Soon Another — Lands on Broadway

NEW YORK — To hear Julian Wachner tell it, playing the organs of Trinity Church Wall Street in recent years has posed risks to both body and spirit.

“It is soul-numbing to play that thing,” Wachner, the church’s hard-driving director of music and arts, said of the digital instrument in Trinity Church, on Lower Broadway. He also called the Schlicker pipe organ, long resident in St. Paul’s Chapel, Trinity’s historic satellite a few blocks north, “tendinitis central.”

But all that will soon change. Some of it already has.

As part of a renovation of the chapel for its 250th anniversary last year, the Schlicker has left the building. Built in 1963 for St. Paul’s in purportedly Bachian style, with an eye toward the then-burgeoning early-music movement, the organ has been replaced by a more versatile, well-used 1989 Noack pipe organ, which has been fitted into the chapel’s slightly expanded 1802 cabinet. And as part of another renovation, of Trinity Church itself, the 15-year-old digital instrument will be replaced by an $8 million pipe organ being made by Rosales Organ Builders, which also produced the acclaimed example in Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

The Rosales is projected to be in place by April 2021. But first things first: The installation of the Noack organ will be celebrated with an inauguration festival at St. Paul’s from Monday to Saturday.

On opening day, Wachner and Jonathan Ambrosino, Trinity’s organ consultant, will demonstrate the instrument, which was purchased for $1 million from the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts; there will also be a concert with Wachner conducting the Choir of Trinity Wall Street and Trinity Baroque Orchestra in works of Duruflé and Bach; and an organ recital by noted performer Peter Sykes. On Thursday, Paul Jacobs, himself a grand New York institution, will play concertos by Poulenc, Christopher Rouse and Wachner, who will also conduct Novus NY, Trinity’s contemporary-music ensemble.

As lower Manhattan grows ever more residential, Trinity has become more intimately entwined with the life of its neighborhood. It was pulled in by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, an event that ended up spurring this frenetic organ activity.

St. Paul’s, across Church Street from the World Trade Center, somehow survived the conflagration without significant structural damage. But its contents were coated with dust, grime and debris, and in the case of the Schlicker organ, with its intricate inner workings and its use of degradable materials, like leather, the damage proved disabling.

Although slightly farther from ground zero, the Aeolian Skinner organ in Trinity Church, dating from 1923, suffered similar damage, and it lay idle and dismantled for several years as the church awaited an insurance settlement. Finally, realizing that reconstruction or the manufacture of a new pipe organ could take another five years, Trinity Wall Street, which was in constant use, arrived at a radical solution: the manufacture of a new digital instrument by Marshall & Ogletree, with sampled sound reproduced by ranks of large speakers, 74 in all, hidden behind dummy pipes in the choir loft. The instrument was developed quickly, at a cost of $300,000.

Electronic organs have been slow to gain respect from pipe organ enthusiasts. The sound emerging from speakers can be tacky, flat and superficial, and typically lacks the gut-wrenching impact of the roar that mighty pipes can produce. Avi Stein, the current associate organist and chorus master at Trinity Wall Street, allows that the Marshall & Ogletree “fakes a pipe organ very well” but adds that it “lacks some of the tangible singing quality that turns a machine into a work of art.” He agreed with Wachner that playing the instrument is, in a way, like listening to a recording.

Owen Burdick, a former director of music, was somewhat more enthusiastic when the instrument was installed, in 2003, saying, “This instrument raises the bar for electronic organs.” But he stopped well short of seeing in it any wave of the future.

“Is it beautiful?” he asked, and answered in the negative.

But Burdick, who left Trinity in 2008, now sings a different tune. Trinity, he said, has not availed itself of improvements that have since become available, including a behemoth of a subwoofer made by Thigpen.

“This thing could kill you,” Burdick said.

Now the organist and choirmaster at the Church of the Ascension and St. Agnes in Washington, Burdick said he hoped that Trinity would donate the digital organ to his parish, adding, “I think Jesus likes the sound of electronic organs just fine.”

At St. Paul’s, meanwhile, the Schlicker organ languished, unused, for eight years. Then things started hopping.

Larry Trupiano, a master organ technician in New York, was asked in 2009 to undertake the painstaking process of cleaning and restoring the Schlicker. And a year later, Wachner blew into town like a whirlwind to take over Trinity’s music program, seemingly bent on turning St. Paul’s into a prime destination for classical and, particularly, early music.

His efforts reached an early, majestic height with Trinity’s landmark commemoration of the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, with a full day of concerts alternating between St. Paul’s and Trinity. But drama seems to dog Wachner’s footsteps, and early the next year, in a stunning reversal, Trinity Wall Street abruptly announced that it was suspending most of its concerts, including the backbone Monday series, Bach at One, while the clergy and vestry re-evaluated the benefits and costs of the music and arts program.

After several tense months, the crisis disappeared as mysteriously (to an outsider) as it had appeared, and 2012 ended with further musical growth. Wachner expanded the activities of Novus NY, and Renée Anne Louprette, then the organist and associate director of music and arts, inaugurated a new Wednesday series, Pipes at One, on the Schlicker organ, by now largely restored.

But Wachner arrived at Trinity, he says, with a dual mandate: to integrate Trinity’s concerts with its liturgical activity into a unified vision for music and arts in lower Manhattan, and to sort out the organ situation. But there was still that ergonomic issue with the Schlicker.

Ambrosino, Trinity’s organ consultant, explained that the instrument, although beloved by many for its bright, crisp sound, could be strenuous to play, partly because — in keeping with its North German Baroque design — it was a tracker instrument, and one of the Schlicker company’s first such ventures. On a tracker organ, the player’s touch on the keyboard or pedals sets in motion a complex mechanical action that produces the sound directly, without the electronic intervention that had come into wide use to ease the player’s burden, as with power steering in a car. (Note that an organ with an electric action is different from an electronic organ as described above, where it is the sound being manipulated, not the touch.)

Later Schlicker tracker organs were evidently much improved and easier to play. “This one,” Wachner said, “seemed like an experiment.”

Trupiano, the technician, who probably knew the instrument better than anyone else from countless hours spent scouring its innards, takes a less drastic view. He acknowledged the instrument’s “technical limitations” but said it was decently playable.

In any case, when Wachner, early in his investigations, learned of the availability of the Noack organ in Chestnut Hill, an instrument he knew and loved from his student days at Boston University, he set off on a single-minded pursuit. He has become only more enthralled since its arrival.

“I knew it was going to be good,” Wachner said, “but I didn’t know it was going to be world class.” And Trupiano, close as the Schlicker was to his heart, has endorsed Wachner’s decision to opt for an instrument of greater stylistic range and the highest quality.

“They couldn’t have made a better choice,” Trupiano said.

The Noack is somewhat larger than the Schlicker, with three manuals to its two and a swell box. Added stops include a rather trivial one that emits a feeble, warbling imitation of bird song, which is jokingly labeled “brass.”

Wachner worked with Stein recently, mapping out registrations for future performances, and both marveled at the Noack’s versatility.

“A French work, and suddenly you’re in Paris,” Wachner said as Stein played parts of Duruflé's “Messe cum Jubilo.” “I can’t believe we have that sound on this thing. The Schlicker could never do that.”

Nor, for what it’s worth, could the Schlicker do bird song.