Ken Cowan gave a marvelous performance on Saturday, September 26th, his first concert since the completion of the Kotzschmar’s centennial renovation (revisit program notes here).
Among the audience members was Allan Kozinn, former music critic and culture writer for The New York Times. In his review for the Portland Press Herald, Kozinn writes:
“Several of the works Cowan played on Saturday – Sifgrid Kar-Elert’s “The Soul of the Lake” and the first part of Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” Prelude, for example – seem to have been chosen specifically because they included delicate passages, and the sound Cowan drew from the organ in those passages was clear and silken, and entirely untroubled by extraneous noise.
But Cowan, not surprisingly, tested the organ’s more robust symphonic timbres as well in a colorful program that was split between transcriptions of orchestral scores and virtuoso works by organist-composers.”
Read the full review at Portland Press Herald.
