“...A powerful rendering of ‘Les Corps Glorieux’ ... she played with an agility that met the music’s coloristic and rhythmic demands.”     - The New York Times

Gail Archer is an international concert organist, lecturer, and recording artist whose third solo CD, An American Idyll was released in Meyer Media in August 2008. (MM08011) Her discography includes A Mystic In the Making (MM07007), featuring the music of Olivier Messiaen, released on the Meyer Media label. 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. Her modern edition and translation of Cantate, ariete a una, due, et tre voci Op. 3 by the seventeenth century Venetian composer Barbara Strozzi has been published in A-R Editions Recent Researches series; a CD of the edition has been released on the Dorian label. Throughout the 2008-09 season, Ms. Archer will be touring North America and Europe in support of her Meyer Media recordings.

Among the areas of expertise upon which Ms. Archer is frequently invited to lecture and perform are early fingering and organ registration in the Dutch and North German School, from Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and his circle to Dieterich Buxtehude and Johann Sebastian Bach; the Leipzig "Great Eighteen" chorale preludes and Clavierubung III; and mixed programs drawn from the full spectrum of the principal composers: Sweelinck, Scheidemann, Strunck, Scheidt, Böhm, Buxtehude and Bach. Her interest also extends to the Italian and Spanish schools of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, especially Frescobaldi. Her complementary interest is the music of Olivier Messiaen. In spring, 2008, Ms. Archer played the complete works of Messiaen in six recitals in New York City. 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." Tine-Out New York cited the Messiaen series as “Best of 2008.” Ms. Archer is currently playing a series of recitals in New York City, Mendelssohn in the Romantic Century in celebration of the 200th birthday of Felix Mendelssohn.

Ms. Archer holds a DMA in organ performance from the Manhattan School of Music and earned an artist diploma from the Boston Conservatory. An active recitalist in both the United States and Europe; she will be featured at the Dresden Musicfestspiel in May 2009. Ms. Archer lives in New York City and is college organist at Vassar College, a member of the organ and music history faculty at Manhattan School of Music and director of the music program at Barnard College, Columbia University. She serves as director of the Young Artist and Artist Organ Recitals at historic Central Synagogue.

Download her high resolution photo HERE (.jpg)

Photo by Buck Ennis.