St.Mark's
Music from a church organ isn't the first thing loaded on most iPods.
But maybe it ought to be.
An organ's sound is so full and resonant, it rearranges the very air around you. The music's "sacred"--inspired and transcendent. And anyone who's ever winced his way through the blare and wheeze of a bad organ knows why a new one's reason to celebrate.
At 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 18, Clive Driskill-Smith, a handsome young Brit who's the sub-organist of Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, will perform a free recital of English, French, and Swiss works--from Bach to César Franck to the contemporary music of Swiss composer Guy Bovet.
He will play on, and in celebration of, the extraordinary new organ at St. Mark's Episcopal Church.
It was built by a young Canadian firm, Juget-Sinclair, and it's a poetic mix of old and new: "cuneiform bellows" but "electronic combination action with 400 levels of memory"; austere, cleanly modern white-oak cases framing the antique rose window; new engineering but ancient methods of construction, with almost every piece made by hand (including the "trackers," thin strips of wood used since medieval times to link the keyboard notes to the pipes).
Tiny St. Mark's has never settled for the cautious norm. It was the one of the first modern churches built west of the Mississippi (and one of the best; according to the American Institute of Architects). Consecrated in 1939, it shocked churchgoers with its cobalt blue, politically radical stained-glass windows, which depict workers' struggle for justice and the incipience of war. In the 1960s, St. Mark's welcomed a woman preacher; in 1993, it became one of the first congregations in the Missouri diocese to call a woman rector. The Rev. Dr. Lydia Speller turned out to be smart, sensitive, and funny, able to guide the congregation into a strong stance of intentional welcome to people of all sexual orientations yet keep it a comfortable place for older or more conservative parishioners.
One of those parishioners was gentle Ruth Proehl, and when she died, she surprised her fellow parishioners by leaving St. Mark's $1 million.
They knew immediately what they wanted to use it for.
Famous among St. Louis musicians for its acoustics, St. Mark's had been suffering with a rather painful, inadequate restoration of a not-great-to-start-with 1938 Aeolian Skinner organ. Luckily, Speller's husband, Dr. John Speller, whom she met at Oxford, is an expert in the history and construction of pipe organs, and the congregation is packed with organists and other musicians. Instead of just buying what they could find, they commissioned the construction of a new organ.
Two years later, it's arrived, and St. Mark's is throwing open its doors so people outside its congregation can enjoy it, too. A reception follows the recital.
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
