Santa Fe Pro Musica to stage four free organ concert recitals
Santa Fe Pro Musica has announced four free organ concert recitals at St. Francis Auditorium in Santa Fe’s New Mexico Museum of Art.
The organists will perform on the recently renovated Reuter pipe organ in the auditorium at 107 W. Palace Ave.
The series opens at noon on Wednesday, Feb. 21, with local organist David Solem playing music by Louis Vierne, J.S. Bach and César Franck.
Solem has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory, where he studied organ, harpsichord, piano and flute. Solem is the assistant organist at First Presbyterian Church and plays keyboards of all kinds. He is also a Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice in Santa Fe.
The second recital is at noon on Wednesday, March 20, with local organist and composer Frederick Frahm.
Frahm directed church music programs across the U.S. for 40 years before retiring in 2021. From 2011 to 2022 he served as a collaborative teaching artist for the Santa Fe Opera. Frahm’s composition catalog includes works for the organ, choral music, chamber music, art song and song cycle, a symphony and a concerto, operas and cantatas. He is a founding director of Firehead Organ Works.
Frahm will perform three of his own compositions: “Three Flower Pieces,” “La Morte Meditata” and “Three Fantasies in the manner of an organ concerto.”
On Wednesday, April 17, at noon, Solem will play Paul Hindemith’s “Organ Sonata No. 1” and Josef Gabriel Rheinberger’s “Organ Sonata No. 8 in E minor, Op. 132.”
Hindemith was a German and American composer, music theorist, teacher, violist and conductor. Rheinberger was an organist and composer from Liechtenstein, who lived in Bavaria for most of his life.
On Wednesday, May 15, at noon,
Maxine Thévenot will perform. The program has yet to be decided.
Thévenot is the founding artistic director of Polyphony: Voices of New Mexico, the state’s first professional resident vocal ensemble. She serves as an adjunct faculty member at the University of New Mexico, where she teaches pipe organ.