Scott Cantrell

DENTON – Zigzag wooden casework and polished tin facade pipes loom over the Winspear Performance Hall stage at the Murchison Performing Arts Center. Sounds piquant and powerful alternately tickle and fill the ears.

KYE R. LEE/DMN

Organ builder Hellmuth Wolff and UNT professor Jesse Eschbach in front of the new organ

While big new pipe organs have been popping up all around area churches, the $1.5 million Hellmuth Wolff instrument at the University of North Texas is the first major academic installation here since the 1993 C.B. Fisk at Southern Methodist University's Caruth Auditorium.

It's a long overdue amenity for an organ department whose primary concert instrument heretofore was a much-altered 1949 M.P. Möller. Buried in a dreary auditorium elsewhere on campus, it hasn't been remotely competitive with university organs elsewhere.

UNT organ professor Jesse Eschbach will play the first recital on the new organ tonight. The wide-ranging program will include music by Bach, Mendelssohn, César Franck, Louis Vierne and Charles Tournemire, and a new work by fellow UNT faculty member Steven Harlos.

The UNT organ is the first in the area for Mr. Wolff, who learned his trade in his native Switzerland, Austria, Canada and the U.S. before setting up his own firm, Hellmuth Wolff & Associés, north of Montreal. In four decades, the firm has produced acclaimed organs for the University of Kansas; McGill University in Montreal and the University of Toronto in Canada; DePauw University in Greenville, Indiana; and numerous churches and cathedrals. But in Texas it's previously been represented only by churches in Houston and San Antonio.

Historically, different countries evolved very different styles of organ building, and they changed over time. Indeed, different regions of what later became a unified Germany had their own distinctive organ types.

UNT professor Jesse Eschbach plays the new concert organ.

Some modern organ builders have specialized in re-creating specific historic styles. In 2003, UNT acquired a Gene Bedient organ closely modeled on mid-18th-century French instruments.

But because the Murchison instrument will now be UNT's primary concert organ, it's been designed to play a wide range of repertory – and to perform along with the university's orchestras, wind ensembles and choral groups.

Mr. Wolff is "conversant with a number of historical styles," Dr. Eschbach says. "And he can do a very successful amalgam in a single instrument of a number of styles that at first appear to be conflicting."

The organ will be better suited than the Möller for playing Bach, the very core of the organ repertory. But Dr. Eschbach also wanted an organ with resources for his own specialty, French music from the last century and a half. This calls for an orchestral richness of sound and expressive effects, crowned by blazing trumpet stops.

"It's the result of 40 years of building organs," Mr. Wolff says of his musical hybrid, "a result of all our experience. We had lots of discussions with Jesse Eschbach. It was a real collaboration to make the stop list. Of course, it is more romantic than many of our instruments, because it is much larger."

Thanks to a gift from Denton philanthropist Paul Voertman, the instrument will be known officially as the Richard Ardoin-Paul Voertman Concert Organ. Beyond tonight's recital, it will be featured in an October conference with performances by James David Christie, Gillian Weir and Jean Guillou, each of whom will also perform with one of the university's ensembles.

JESSE ESCHBACH plays the new Wolff organ at the Murchison Performing Arts Center, University of North Texas, Denton, at 7:30 p.m. today. Free. 940-565-2791.