There is a wonderful photo on the front cover of this new disc which perfectly sets the nostalgic mood: Congress Street, looking east, in Portland, Maine, c. 1920’s (looking surprisingly like Pearl Street of the same time in our hometown of Albany). As organist Harold Stover writes: “There was a time in America when technological progress was equated with mechanical complexity, when radio and talking movies still lay in the future, and when the recording industry was barely out of its infancy. In those days, pipe organs joined the great ocean liners and the mighty steam locomotives on the cutting edge of modernity and were a central component in the listening experience of the American public. They were found almost everywhere that music was a part of life: in churches, to be sure, but also in concert halls, theatres, school auditoriums, hotel ballrooms, mortuaries, sporting arenas, carousels, and the mansions and even the yachts of the well-to-do. They provided! a world of sound more varied than the commonplace parlor piano, more sensual at its softest, more awesome at its loudest. In an era when aspirations of personal advancement included cultural as well as material goals, the organ and the music played on it were benchmarks of social arrival in civic, ecclesiastical and domestic life.” Harold Stover is a native of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and a Juilliard graduate. He has appeared at Riverside Church in New York, Westminster Abbey in London and many other distinguished locales. He presently serves as Organist and Director of Music at Woodfords Congregational Church in Portland, Maine. He presents here a wonderful selection of old and new works (with his own compositions based on traditional forms) giving the organ enthusiast a chance to hear some familiar names and the means of meeting new ones. And thanks to the newest technology of CD, we get to relive the wonderful sounds of one of the organs of that bygone time.
