Performing Arts

If I say "Huh?" a lot this week, it's because I lost a chunk of hearing Monday evening at Park Cities Presbyterian Church. In a town with several very loud organs, PCPC's new Schoenstein may be the loudest of all.

Of course, one doesn't have to pile on all those massive foundations and loud reeds and couplers. But organist David Briggs, presented by the Dallas Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, repeatedly built up roars worthy of a jet engine at close quarters.

Mr. Briggs, a Briton now based in Boston, has formidable technique, both for playing notes and for kaleidoscopic stop changes and pumpings of swell pedals. Known for virtuoso organ transcriptions of orchestra works, he put on quite a show of Strauss' tone poem Death and Transfiguration.

And he demonstrated his genius at improvisation at both piano (in the hypnotic style of the French composer/organist Olivier Messiaen) and organ (in the razzle-dazzle manner and deliciously saturated harmonies of another Frenchman, Pierre Cochereau).

He masterfully sustained and built tension through Messiaen's Vision of the Eternal Church and tossed off Marcel Dupré's flashy Prelude and Fugue in G minor with insouciant brilliance.

But tuggings at beginnings and ends of phrases in César Franck's C-major Fantasy were quite a bit too much of a good thing. And what should have been subtle crescendos and decrescendos in an arrangement of Ravel's Pavane for a Dead Princess bulged and retreated too blatantly.

The PCPC organ is a sort of updating of the "symphonic" organs perfected in the 1930s by the American organbuilder Ernst M. Skinner. It's lavishly equipped with nominally orchestral stops, but also has enough upperwork to make Bach and the like playable.

But it's much louder than Skinner's masterpieces (including organs at Girard College Chapel in Philadelphia and Woolsey Hall at Yale University), and no latter-day builder has recaptured the subtle sweetness of Skinner's solo stops. But a lighter hand with registrations Monday would have yielded happier effects.

PLAN YOUR LIFE David Briggs accompanies the silent film The Phantom of the Opera at 7:30 tonight at First United Methodist Church, 1928 Ross. $10 ($5 for students, seniors).

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