This year, the Chamber Music Society’s Baroque Festival will offer audiences a rare opportunity to experience the warm and enveloping sound of the Alice Tully Hall organ. In two concerts on December 8 and 10, organist Paolo Bordignon leads a program of repertoire by giants of 17th- and 18th-century solo organ and chamber music, including Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Bach, Handel, and Telemann. I spoke with Bordignon about the rich history and structural properties of the hall’s 4,200-pipe instrument, as well as the unique musical advantages it provides when playing Baroque repertoire. An edited version of our conversation follows.

Tell us a little bit about the Alice Tully Hall organ. How would you contextualize it, and what should we know about the distinctive aspects of the instrument?
Paolo Bordignon: The 2024–25 season represents the 50th anniversary of the organ. It was made in 1974 near Zurich by a company called Orgelbau Kuhn, and it was installed in 1975. It was a gift from Miss Alice Tully herself, who wanted the instrument there.

There are really two camps of organists. Those who prefer the fuller, more powerful, rounder, and richer tone of Romantic instruments, kind of in the heroic vein. And then there is a more recent camp that wanted to be able to play earlier repertoire with lightness and clarity, especially given all the complex counterpoint of that music. The Tully Hall organ has 64 stops distributed over four manuals and pedal. It’s certainly an eclectic stop list, but it is also an instrument of the latter style with clarity and with lightness, although it has plenty of impact as well. It’s really a perfect and wonderful vehicle for music of the 18th century, of the High Baroque. When the great virtuoso E. Power Biggs (one of the champions of that latter camp) first played this instrument, he said, “This is what God intended organs to sound like."

Can you describe the experience of playing an organ of this size in a hall like this?
One of the great joys of playing a new pipe organ is that every one of these instruments is totally unique and designed for the space in which it’s installed. This particular organ has a unique set of stops; there’s no other organ that has exactly this combination of sound. So when you sit down to play any piece of music, you have to decide which stops you will use to make certain sounds. You are orchestrating from scratch at every instrument, and that process of discovery and exploration on an organ is always a tremendous joy.

A wonderful thing about the Alice Tully Hall organ is its placement, in that it speaks directly with tremendous impact towards the audience. And that’s not necessarily the case in, for example, a liturgical setting where you might be hearing the organ from around the corner. In this case, it has the kind of presence of an actor on stage, and you have a sense of rhetoric and oratory right from the start.

The music of the 18th century makes use of that oratory and rhetoric, giving these pieces a great sense of impact. I think, for example, of the energy of Vivaldi that I’ll play in a transcription by the German composer Johann Gottfried Walther. This is a perfect instrument for this kind of music, especially considering its placement on stage. The way it confronts and engages the listener is a thrilling experience.

What are the challenges of playing this organ in a chamber music setting, as we’ll be hearing on your program in December?
One of the joys of this organ is also one of its challenges, which is that the instrumentalist is seated basically among the pipes. So in order to get a perfect idea of what the balances are like, as in any other chamber music, you’ve got to have somebody go out into the hall and really listen. Are the softs as soft as I need them? Are the colors exactly correct? Am I getting the right kind of duration in attack, step by step as we go? The placement of this instrument makes it possible to play chamber music very well because the organist is close to the pipes, and the pipes themselves are very close to the other players on stage. 

That is not a given in places where the organ might be perched way up high, whether in a concert hall or a church setting. So playing chamber music on the Alice Tully Hall organ was clearly part of the original mission of the instrument when it was conceived by the builders.