Carpenter's second album for Telarc will be another first for Cameron: his first recording made on a pipe organ, not just any organ, but New York's Church of Saint Mary the Virgin's Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ. (Revolutionary was made on a virtual pipe organ, an instrument that Cameron usually prefers), and it will be all Bach and LIVE! This CD/DVD two-disc album will include three preludes and fugues from J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and five preludes and fugues from the major organ works of Bach. The DVD will feature performances on a Wurlitzer pipe organ built in the early 20th Century and will include Festive Overture, Op. 96 by Dmitri Shostakovich; Gershwin's "Nice Work If You Can Get It" and "Love Walked In"; The Alcotts, from Charles Ives' Concord Sonata; the jazz Toccatina, Op. 36 by contemporary Ukranian composer Nikolai Kapustin; Carpenter's legendary post-Horowitz arrangement of Sousa's The Stars and Stripes Forever; Astor Piazzola's Libertango; another famous Horowitz encore re-imagined for organ, Mozkowski's Sparks ("Etincelles"); Franz Schubert's Erlknig; and Sergei Rachmaninov's arrangement of Bach's Violin Sonata No. 3 in E Majortranscribed for organ, of course, by Carpenter.
Revolutionary showcases an artist who is not only breaking ground, but who runs a musical gamut that any musician would be extremely hard-pressed to match. There are only four organ works included. Three are major pinnacles of the organ repertoire (the blistering, nearly unplayable Etude in Octaves by the French modernist Jeanne Demessieux; Prelude and Fugue in B major by Marcel Dupré; and Bach's deeply moving chorale-prelude Now Come, Savior of the Gentiles, while the fourth is the world premiere recording of Cameron's suggestive Love Song No. 1 (2008). The album's major departures, though, are found in Duke Ellington's Solitude (wittily combined with Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze); Liszt's Mephisto Waltz, and Vladimir Horowitz' Carmen Variations. Here are two of Chopin's Études in versions so convincing that they might have been organ music; and Cameron's Evolutionary Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, an outrageous survey of the various instrumental arrangements that made Bach's work famous. All this is recorded not on a pipe organ, but on the equally revolutionary Marshall & Ogletree Virtual Pipe Organ at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City - an organ that, rising out of the destruction of Trinity's pipe organ on September 11, 2001, continues to challenge the status quo of the pipe organ and the artistic possibilities of organ playing in general.
