The Messaen Concert Series
Olivier Messiaen
January-May 2008, New York City
Gail Archer, Organ

In honor of one of the greatest organist composers of all time, Archer presents a Messiaen musical journey exploring all six of his complete organ works, while showcasing six of Manhattan’s superior church organs. See the upcoming concert dates here.

Read the following articles! (click to download full article)

Review:
"Within Ms. Archer's vivid, muscular performance, in fact, were moments of striking simplicity, most notably the declarative single-line melodies, based on plainchant, that open several movements and seem like straight forward professions of faith before the inevitable grappling with the terrors of the sublime... In the more expansively dense sections Ms. Archer played with an unflagging power and assertiveness."
-The New York Times, May 31, 2008

Review:
"A riveting, marathon performance... Archer treated the audience to a limousine ride through a minefield: fireworks were going off everywhere, but she glided along with an agility that seemed effortless."
-Lucid Culture Blog, May 30, 2008

Review:
"Ms. Archer gave a solid performance, emphasizing the dramatic to great effect. In the section titled 'The Father Unbegotten,' she expertly struck the balance between the frightening and the gentle, the fortissimo tone clusters and the delicate
fingerings of lyrically melodic snatches."
-The New York Sun,April 22, 2008

Review:
"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."
-The New York Times, January 15, 2008

Interview/preview:
"A unique concert series starts this Sunday at an Upper East Side church, featuring a passionate musician who is helping to change the image of the church organ."
-NY1, January 11, 2008

Interview:
"'Messiaen's music, she suggested, is just what New Yorkers need to refresh their minds and spirits in the new year. 'It's very peaceful and meditative,' she said. 'It allows you space to think and breathe and just be at peace with your own thoughts.'"
-The New York Sun, January 8, 2008

CD: A Mystic In the Making
Olivier Messiaen
Gail Archer, Organ
(2007 Release from Meyer Media)

A Mystic In The Making was nominated for a Grammy in the 'instrumentalist without an orchestra' category.

Read the following glowing reviews! (click to download full article)

December 2007
"Dr. Archer plays these formidable works with authority, assertiveness, and rhythmic exactitude...Dr. Archer's [interpretaions] are compelling."
-The American Organist
Article and images Copyright 2007, by the American Guild of Organists.Reproduced by permission of The American Organist Magazine.

October 2007
"Archer plays with just the right combination of precision and rhythmic fluidity that the music needs to dance and soar."
- All Music Guide

September 2007
"...[A Mystic In the Making] will rattle all the glassware in your house"
– American Record Guide

May 2007
"Gail Archer has become one of the world's few star concert organists....Archer balances power, clarity and colour beautifully throughout L'Ascension and Les corps glorieux."
– John Terauds, Toronto Star

At the Organ, Shades of a Mystic in the Making
By ALLAN KOZINN

July 15, 2002

For concertgoers who are used to watching performers make music, organ recitals can be peculiar events. Typically, the player is hidden away in a church's organ loft, unseen by the audience except for bows at the start and the finish. Perhaps that is as it should be: the audience, bathed in a grand, variegated sound, can focus on the music or its spiritual associations, without the distraction of a performer.

Riverside Church lets listeners have it both ways in its annual summer series of Tuesday evening organ recitals. A video image of the organist is projected onto a screen at the front of the church, offering a static view (from above) of the player and the instruments. The screen is large enough to show the mechanics of the performance; but for listeners who prefer the organist's traditional invisibility, it is small enough — in the context of this enormous church — to ignore.

Gail Archer opened the series on Tuesday evening with a powerful rendering of "Les Corps Glorieux," the 1939 work that Messiaen subtitled "seven short visions of the life everlasting." The deeply personalized, mystical idiom that Messiaen created is not fully developed in this cycle. Yet, hearing the piece with the experience of his later scores, one can see that language clearly in formation.

The opening movement, "Subtilité des Corps Glorieux," evokes the resurrected bodies in the afterlife in a single, calmly winding line. From there, the imagery builds gradually, with heavenly fountains drawn in gently cloudy harmonies, smoking incense suggested in a poetically simple line in reedy coloration and, in the work's central movement, the battle of life and death offered in bright, brash colors and dense chromaticism, all of which resolve into graceful serenity (by way of flute timbres) as life prevails.

The bright-hued fifth and sixth movements celebrate the vitality inherent in salvation, and the finale, "Le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité," is contemplative, but with an undercurrent of chromaticism that gives it texture and keeps it surprising.

Ms. Archer offered a carefully considered tour of these painterly movements, and perhaps most important, she played with an agility that met the music's coloristic and rhythmic demands without calling attention to itself.