Organists Who Play in Glass Houses : Jacobsen to Demonstrate Transcription Technique Tonight at Crystal Cathedral

In an age preoccupied with performing music on old “authentic” instruments, Jared Jacobsen is trying to restore the once-popular practice of playing transcriptions on huge pipe organs.

“Organ transcriptions engage audiences immediately,” Jacobsen said in a phone interview from New York, where he is participating in the Chautauqua Institution Summer School of Music. “People used to do (transcriptions of) everything for everything else. If you heard a Wagner Overture that nobody else had heard, you rearranged and took it out on the road.

“The art of the organ transcription was very popular until maybe the end of the ‘40s. Then it sort of died out. With the rise of the authentic performance practice movement and the neoclassic and neo-Baroque organ-building movement, people were no longer being taught to do transcriptions. And there are few instruments on which we can work. But a few of us are popularizing them again.

“The idea is not to make the work sound exactly like it did on the original instrument but to give it life as an organ piece. It helps if the organ has a lot of flexibility.”

Jacobsen, 40, will offer a program entirely of transcriptions--ranging from Bach’s organ setting of Vivaldi’s Concerto in A minor for Two Violins to Jacobsen’s own account of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”--on Friday at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove.

Making a transcription isn’t an easy task, according to the organist. “Most keyboard transcriptions require a lot of piano technique to make them work right,” he said. “They are much more difficult than most original works for the organ.

“Oftentimes, transcribing from the original--if the original was for large orchestra, as in the case of Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird’ or something that requires a lot of people playing--you have to enhance the music with sort of wild runs and arpeggios, chromatic scales, big chords, various acoustical devices to make the music fill out properly.”

As difficult as it can be to get the transcription to maintain the integrity of the original composition, Jacobsen said, it is nearly as important to match repertory and venue.

“One of the challenges when you play at the Crystal Cathedral is not to clobber the audience with every single piece,” he said. “Part of the fun will be playing the room as much as the organ. To get the right acoustic effect is to get the room ringing with the music. Playing with the sound and the silence. It’s not a matter of pushing down the notes, which is hard enough, but listening to what is happening in the room.”

That’s one reason he was eager to play at the Crystal Cathedral when the invitation came from his “longtime” friend, Frederick Swann, director of music and organist at the Garden Grove facility.

“I’ve been to almost all of the major recitals there since the organ has been finished,” he said. “I have an idea of what works there and what doesn’t. For some things, I will try to make really exotic sounds to make these pieces come to life.

“My understanding is that the organ really sounds quite good . . . at the console. Lately, I’ve been playing at the Washington Cathedral. I would not be able to do these pieces there because much of the organ is (placed) way over your head or around the corner. At the Crystal Cathedral, what you’re hearing there is what the audience is getting.”

Jacobsen said an organ in a glass building such as the Crystal Cathedral “ought not to work as well as it does.”

“Part of the reason it works is that the organ is a couple of stories above the heads of the audience,” he explained. “Then, there are dramatic trumpets at the corners, which set sounds spinning around the audience’s heads. That is an advantage.

“It’s not an ideal organ for cute, little Bach Trio Sonatas, but it’s perfect for (Mussorgsky’s) ‘Old Castle’ or ‘Baba-Yaga’ shrieking through the air and terrorizing villages on her broom. You can get those kinds of effects because of the acoustic in that building. . . . “

“When you get to play for the Crystal Cathedral, you have to find the perfect program,” he said. “That’s the right instrument to do the ‘Pictures.’ ”

Mussorgsky’s music has been transcribed for orchestra in different versions by Ravel and Stokowski.

But why organ?

“Over the years, various organ versions have been done by people in Europe,” Jacobsen said. “I was convinced that someone would do them here, but nobody has, not until now.

“It turns out that the work translates very easily into an organ piece. The appeal of the piece is in color and image and not so much in actual keyboard-writing. For my version, I have purposefully not listened to anybody else’s orchestration. I’m working strictly from the piano score--what pictures the piano music suggests to me and going after that sound on the organ.”

For Jacobsen, the foot pedals and the multiple manuals of an organ offer a distinct advantage in Mussorgsky’s score.

“In many of the movements, the piano version really stretches what you can do with 10 fingers. But if you can play the bass line or two lines with the feet, that frees the hands to do things on top. It works out better.

“I’m almost convinced--if I didn’t know better--that Mussorgsky had the organ in mind when he wrote it. It works so well. I’ve had to make very few changes.”

Only one part of the score gave him problems.

“The movement I had to do the most creative readjusting was the last one, ‘The Great Gate of Kiev,’ ” he said. “In the piano version, I think that’s the weakest movement of all. Unless you have enormous strength or a huge piano, it doesn’t have the huge, sonic impact it needs. So I had to fill out chords and add some pianistic, organistic things.”

Organist Jared Jacobsen will play transcriptions of works by Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and others at 8:15 tonight at the Crystal Cathedral, 12141 Lewis St, Garden Grove. Tickets: $6. Information: (714) 971-4017.