Organist Carpenter likes to stamp out boundaries

LITTLE ROCK — Cameron Carpenter, as the Wall Street Journal proclaims, is “Not Your Grandma’s Organist.” (“Alternatingly dazzling and subtle, and always fired by a profound musical intelligence,” the review continues.)

The Dallas Morning News, perhaps hyperbolically, calls him “the most controversial organist alive.” The Los Angeles Times calls him “one of the rare musicians who changes the game of his instrument.”

Carpenter was different even in his youth — his official biography described him, at age 21, as “the youngest and most controversial American organist” when he first performed in Little Rock, at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, in 2003.

Now in his early 30s, Carpenter will play at a different Trinity — 6 p.m. Sunday at Trinity United Methodist Church, 1101 N. Mississippi St., Little Rock, as part of the church’s “Trinity Presents ...” series.

Admission is by free ticket. Call (501) 377-1161.

“I did play in Little Rock, at Trinity Cathedral, but that was before my career became ‘something else,’” Carpenter says. “This is my first performance there in the modern incarnation of Cameron.”

Carpenter, among other flamboyances, designs his own outfits as well as his concert programs.

“As you know, the [publicity] photos always seem to lag two or three years behind; I try to update mine as soon as possible,” he says. “It’s been a long time since I wore the white crystal outfit,” he adds, and he’s no longer doing leather.

His current crop of costumes, “and you can print it in the article,” includes items from Chanel’s men’s collection “and some things by Preen.”

Carpenter makes a big deal out of challenging the ways in which the organist is promoted and the organ is played, and his programs often include works that were not written for the instrument, including piano music by Franz Liszt and Sergei Rachmaninoff, Claude Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, music from film scores and “re-imaginings” of popular songs by Kate Bush, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Annie Lennox.

He will announce his program from stage — “that’s kind of a trademark policy,” he explains. It will include a “broad array of repertoire: Bach and Bach-Busoni; compositions, improvisations, transcriptions; Liszt; hard to say, possibly some Schubert.

“It’s actually a classical program — classical in everything except the onus of the word ‘classical.’”

Carpenter was a wunderkind, starting his studies on the piano and organ at age 4. He gave his first public recital at 11, performing both books of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. He toured for two years as a boy soprano with the American Boychoir. He’s a 2006 graduate from the Juilliard School and lives in Berlin.

“I’m sort of the world’s foremost advocate of the highly evolved digital organ, which is something I’m attempting to make into a touring instrument in the next year,” he says.

But he’s pleased to be able to perform on Trinity’s nondigital instrument.

“The presenters had planned to bring in a large digital instrument of some type, but that ran into complications,” he says.

“And then when they sent me the information on [their] instrument, I encouraged them to go ahead with it. Because while [it’s] certainly not the world’s largest organ, and, I presume, not even the largest organ in Little Rock, it seems to me from what I can see on paper and a lifetime of playing various instruments, I suspect that it’s an instrument of considerable charm and variety.

“I suspect it’s enormously versatile, probably rather powerful, and something of an illusion of a sort: I strongly suspect I can get much more out of it than is actually there.”