Pipe Dreams

The organ is central to our fourth Masterworks. Vero’s brilliant Andrew Galuska will guide us in this rare opportunity to hear Horatio Parker’s Concerto for Organ. A late-19th Century American composer, organist, and renowned pedagogue, Horatio Parker was one of the most influential musicians of his day, spending fifteen years as a both a professor and dean at Yale. We open with a work originally for organ by one of Parker’s students, Charles Ives. We play an orchestral arrangement of the work by William Schuman, who preserves wit, charm, and humor of the original. The second half features Elgar’s magnificent Enigma Variations. This theme and fourteen variations—each one a portrait of a friend—is one of the crown jewels of the repertoire—at turns virtuosic, poignant, hilarious, and sentimental.