Liszt finds a kindred spirit in the organist

I once attended a gathering of medievalists who were into something called creative anachronism. Expecting an evening sedate and scholarly, I wandered, instead, into a raucous affair, more Monty Python than anything else. It turns out that even sophisticated 14th century fantasies can be justification for otherwise unassuming creative anachronisers to get silly, lewd, bring out the whips and chains.

The early music movement is not, in some ways, dissimilar. Anachronistic clavichords, portative organs, wheezy woodwinds and meek-sounding gut strings make a small noise and need a little creative encouragement. But like their history-buff, party-animal brethren, exciting period-instrument performers are often intimidated by the modern world or, in this case, its modern instruments.

Not though, Martin Haselbock, who gave a wild -- if still within reason -- all-Liszt recital on the Walt Disney Concert Hall organ Sunday night.

The organist/conductor/scholar is a properly credentialed early-musicker. He has been music director of the Viennese period-instrument band Wiener Akademie for 20 years. Apparently, he likes nothing better then to spend his spare time unearthing lost music by Baroque composers you’ve probably never heard of (such as Porpora and Muffat) in “the dusty archives of Kiev and Vienna,” so says an official bio. Next fall he becomes music director of the Musica Angelica, Los Angeles’ leading early-music ensemble.

But he also has another musical life as a longtime Lisztian, and Liszt’s organ music isn’t early anything. It was outrageous in the 19th century, and under the right circumstance, it can still seem outrageous today. The right circumstances are a big, bold, colorful organ in an acoustic where you can hear a pin drop and where the low notes get physical, causing the floor and anything on it to vibrate. The right circumstances are also when these excessive fantasies and fugues and sets of manically over-the-top variations are played by an organist with technique and imagination, few inhibitions and only enough good sense to keep things together.

Disney has the right organ, and Haselbock has the nerve to unleash most of this music’s raw power. It was a nasty night, dark and wet, and the sleeping giant, as this organ sometimes has been called, was awakened, given the scent of blood and restrained only by a long, weak leash. Afterward I overheard more than one listener allude to the phantom of the opera.

For the first half of the program, Haselbock concentrated on works inspired by Bach. Liszt’s love of Bach was, as much in Liszt’s life, flamboyant. In his “Prelude and Fugue on the Name B-A-C-H,” he took the four pitches of Bach’s name (B is B-flat and H is B in German musical convention) and raged and roared over them, dreamed about them in the tiniest wisps of sound, heard them in every color of the aural rainbow, turned them into complex contrapuntal acrostics and wrote them with fireworks in the sky.

Even when Liszt transcribed a prelude and fugue from a cantata it sounded like a cosmic fanfare. His variations on bass line from the cantata, “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Sagen,” is Bach all over the map, and the map here is a Hieronymus Boschian imaginary landscape.

After intermission, Haselbock played Liszt’s largest and most extravagant organ work, “Fantasy and Fugue on the Chorale ‘Ad nos, ad salutarem undam,’ ” the chorale taken from Meyerbeer’s grand opera, “Le Prophete.” Here Liszt exploits everything a big organ can do. Played in a resonant environment, it shakes the rafters and the psyche.

Happily, Haselbock is not afraid of the extremes in this music. He knows how to create drama from dynamics. He is also a master of the most elusive aspect of organ playing: clarity.

How to keep all Liszt’s crazy chromatic contrapuntal lines sounding distinct in the midst of a demonic diapason outpouring? It can’t be done without lessening the impact. But Haselbock found compromises. One was through crisp rhythmic rigidity. Another was by gauging his registrations as carefully as a painter uses a color wheel. The third was by playing everything just a bit too fast, as a way to hold wayward music together.

That care, while appreciated, was the loose leash. Ultimately, a stubborn Lisztian wants neither reason nor restraint, rather full-out madness. But as I said, it was a nasty night, and Haselbock left us just sane enough to hit the waterlogged freeways while still so Liszt-logged that this nutty, magnificent music danced to the rhythm of every insistent raindrop.