Jan Kraybill

Vibrant and Organic: Kansas City Symphony Performs Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 and Premieres Rogerson’s “The Little Prince”

 concert review by Libby Hanssen in KC Studio Magazine, June 8, 2022 (click link for full text; highlights reproduced below)

In a concert of fantasy and excitement, the Kansas City Symphony gave a fresh, lively performance, including a commanding world premiere with a rising violin star. 

Guest conductor Gemma New led the ensemble with clarity and passion throughout Saturday’s performance in Helzberg Hall. 

Maurice Ravel’s “Mother Goose Suite” was an exquisite jewel of shimmering color and character and, though it’s a challenging piece, had a clean, easy feeling to it. The orchestra gave this performance sprightly energy, delicate and responsive to New’s full gestures. ... 

Fantasy, too, shaped Chris Rogerson’s first violin concerto, commissioned by the Kansas City Symphony. (KCS premiered Rogerson’s “A Single Candle” in 2014 and “Of Simple Grace” in 2018 with cellist Yo-Yo Ma.) ... 

Based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s exquisite novella, “The Little Prince,” the concerto was written for his friend Benjamin Beilman, fresh talent new to Kansas City audiences and a performer to remember.

For Camille Saint-Saëns’ Symphony no. 3, nicknamed “Organ” for its organic and impressive use of the instrument, the orchestra was joined by Kansas City’s own Grammy Award-nominated Jan Kraybill. An always impressive work, the orchestra and soloist recorded it in 2013. 

From the questing opening, searching and reflective, to the “aha, found it!” release, the piece was triumph upon triumph. The symphony contains perhaps one of the loveliest melodies to exist in classical music, its lightness given such an uplifting, floating quality it brought to mind a vast skyfield, clouds in sunlight as far as the eye could see. 

It was exhilarating, too: New brought the orchestra right up close to the edge of overwhelming, without losing control. 

Kraybill is easily one of Kansas City’s–and the organ world’s–treasures. At times the use of organ was so subtle that it felt subconscious rather than heard, and then other times the effect is reversed: the crash of the chord so completely consuming that little else filtered through to comprehend. 

It’s heartening to hear a performance like this: new material performed with the same confidence of familiar works, standard repertoire performed with thrilling enthusiasm, the concert experience renewed and vibrant.

CD review of 'The Orchestral Organ,' July 2019 

During the 1800s, significant advances in organ design enabled organists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce transcriptions of orchestral pieces that could legitimately claim to rival their counterparts in tone colour and detail. To be sure, the transcription wasn't conceived as a replacement for the original but rather as a means by which to experience it differently and hear it with fresh ears. On 'The Orchestral Organ,' Dr. Jan Kraybill performs organ transcriptions of material by Sibelius, Holst, Wagner, Verdi, Barber, and others, and while many of the works are familiar, they assume vivid new life when presented in this organ-only context. 

It's not just any organ, either: on the seventy-four-minute release, Kraybill, Organ Conservator at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, and Organist-in-Residence at the international headquarters of Community of Christ in Independence, Missouri, performs the eleven pieces using the Julia Irene Kauffman Casavant Organ at the Kauffman Center's Helzberg Hall. The parts for the pipe organ were produced at the Casavant Frères workshop in Quebec and then transported to Kansas City, where four months of installation and testing were required before the organ, which boasts four keyboards for hands and one for feet, seventy-nine stops, and 102 ranks (of its 5,548 pipes, the biggest is thirty-two feet tall, the smallest the size of a pencil), could be deemed ready. The multiple keyboards, of course, allow the organist to generate a huge range of textures, including contrapuntal and homophonic. 

Adding to the release's appeal, the pieces by Tchaikovsky, Holst, and Wagner are premiere recordings of the organ transcriptions, and Emil von Reznícek's is a world premiere. Representative of the album are the treatments of Barber's Adagio for Strings and Sibelius's Finlandia; being so well-known, they offer case studies for how effectively the transcriptions enable the listener to experience familiar material in a new way. In its 1949-published transcription, Barber's best-known piece retains all of the ceremonial grandeur and pathos for which it's become famous, and the power the Helzberg Hall organ's capable of generating is effectively shown in the declamatory chords that appear after the methodically winding ascent that climaxes two-thirds of the way in. Of course, with the piece known for its strings scoring rather than full orchestra (more precisely, it first appeared as the second movement in Barber's String Quartet, Op. 11, after which Toscanini conducted the string orchestra version during a 1938 radio broadcast), Barber's setting allows perhaps for a more seamless translation than others on the release. The 1907 transcription of Sibelius's 1900 tone poem retains the drama and robustness of the original, and the stately, hymn-like closing section exudes all the poignancy of a strong orchestral performance. 

Tchaikovsky's Coronation March, which grew out of a commission to write a grand ceremonial march and a cantata to grace the coronation of Tsar Alexandr III (1845-1894), is as declamatory and spirited as one would expect, the organ, with its ample resources of colour and contrast, again proving itself an ideal vehicle for the music's expression. A march of a slightly different kind is heard in the 1884 transcription of Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette, a macabre yet lighthearted romp the Faust composer wrote in 1872 and which later became famously known as the musical material used in Alfred Hitchcock's television show. One final march concludes the recording, an 1885 transcription of Verdi's “Grand March” from Aïda, which premiered fourteen years earlier. The piece, which appears in Act II when the Egyptian warrior Rhadames returns to Thebes after his victory over the Ethiopians, is suitably triumphant in tone, the organ in this instance evoking the sound of trumpets and the magnificent spectacle of chariots, banners, and elephants. 

In being based on medieval English carols, Holst's “Chaconne” from his three-movement Suite No.1 in E-flat Major, for Military Band (1909) lends itself superbly to an organ treatment, the transcription of the work's opening part in this case published in 1933 and recorded for the first time by Kraybill. Much the same could be said of the 1911 rendering of Wagner's “Forest Murmurs” from Siegfried, which shows the organ's capacity for tone painting and its ability to evoke the sounds of birds chirping and a rustling forest. Also included on the release are performances of a 1922-published treatment of Saint-Saëns' stirring “Romance” from his Orchestral Suite in D, Op.49 and an 1885 transcription of Mendelssohn's sprightly “Scherzo” from A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

Among the lesser-known works is Reznícek'sPraeludium and Chromatic Fugue, at almost fourteen minutes the longest piece. Originally written for large orchestra, Reznícek himself created the organ transcription for this adventurous, ever-winding travelogue in 1920 and published it a year later (it's, in fact, the only transcription on the recording done by the composer himself). Rounding out the presentation is the effervescent Praeludium, written by Finnish-born Swedish composer Edvard Armas Järnefelt in 1900 and transcribed for organ nineteen years later. Regardless of whether the material is familiar or not, Kraybill faithfully adheres to the works' transcriptions, her primary focus on honouring the material as written and staying true in her performances to the character and dynamics of the original creations.