Gail
Archer is a GRAMMY-nominated, international concert organist,
recording artist, choral conductor and lecturer. In spring
2010, she celebrated the 325th anniversary of the birth of
Johann Sebastian Bach with six concerts around New York City,
concluding with the Art of Fugue at Central Synagogue.
Lucid Culture proclaimed, "Like the composers she
chooses, Archer's playing spans the range of human emotions—with
Bach, there’s always plenty to communicate, but this
time out it was mostly an irresistibly celebratory vibe."
In 2009, her spring series, Mendelssohn in the Romantic
Century was inspired by Mendelssohn's extraordinary versatility
as composer, conductor, performer and scholar and included
the organ music of his sister, Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara
Schumann. The series was recorded live and is available on-line
at Meyer-Media. Ms. Archer was the first American woman to
play the complete works of Olivier Messiaen for the centennial
of the composer's birth in 2008. The New York Times declared,
"Ms. Archer's well-paced interpretation had a compelling
authority. She played with a bracing physicality in the work's
more driven passages and endowed humbler ruminations with
a sense of vulnerability and awe." Time-Out New York
recognized the Messiaen cycle as "Best of 2008"
in Classical music and opera.
 Ms.
Archer's recordings span the seventeenth to the twenty-first
centuries, a festive discography that highlights her
musical mastery on grand Romantic instruments as well
as Baroque tracker organs. Her most recent compact disc,
Bach, the Transcendent Genius, celebrates the brilliant
improvisations on Lutheran hymn tunes of the "Great 18"
chorale preludes (MM1013). The release on Meyer-Media, is
the first recording on the Paul Fritts tracker organ at Vassar
College, Poughkeepsie, New York. An American Idyll,
released by Meyer Media in August, 2008 (MM08011), and recorded
on the E. M. Skinner/Randall Dyer organ at Rollins College,
Winter Park, Florida, features American organ music from 1900
to the present, including music by Joan Tower and a work commissioned
by Ms. Archer, Praeludium super Pange Lingua by David Noon.
Her centennial concerts in honor of Olivier Messiaen also
produced A Mystic In the Making (MM07007), recorded
on the Aeolian-Skinner organ at Columbia University, which
includes two complete cycles, L'Ascension, and Les
Corps Glorieux. Her solo debut CD The Orpheus of
Amsterdam: Sweelinck and his Pupils (CACD 88043), recorded
on the Fisk organ at Wellesley College, was released in 2006
by London's CALA Records. Ms. Archer recorded works of Bach
along with narration read by Robert Thurman as part of a project
for the Tennessee Players and the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship,
Words of Albert Schweitzer and the Music of Bach.
A live concert recording made at the Organalia Festival in
Turin, Italy was released in 2005.
During
the 2009-2010 season, Ms. Archer promoted her new recording,
Bach, the Transcendent Genius; highlights include recitals
at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Exeter College, Oxford,
Harvard, Princeton, Luther College, Shorter College, Grace
and Holy Trinity Cathedral, Kansas City, MO and St. Joseph
R. C. Church, Macon, Georgia. Ms. Archer is college organist
at Vassar College, and director of the music program at Barnard
College, Columbia University where she conducts the Barnard-Columbia
Chorus. She serves as director of the artist and young organ
artist recitals at historic Central Synagogue, New York City.
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“...A
powerful rendering of ‘Les Corps Glorieux’... she played with
an agility that met the music’s coloristic and rhythmic demands.” 
