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SCMP Reporter

WHEN organist Felix Gubser practises at home, the sound is full enough to fill a huge church. 'But fortunately the houses in Switzerland are further apart than in Hong Kong, so the neighbours are not too seriously disturbed,' Gubser said.

  His instrument is made by Rieger, an organ-maker from near Bregenz in Germany, probably the best in the world, and Gubser was relieved when, accepting the booking to perform in Hong Kong on Friday, he found that the Cultural Centre had a Rieger organ.

  'Hong Kong has a wonderful instrument, I am looking forward to performing on it,' he said.

  He said Riegers could be found in the top venues throughout the world - in Paris, Tokyo, Adelaide and Pretoria.

  'They are very sensitive to the touch, Rieger understands the importance of the connection between the player and the pipes,' he said.

  'The other critical thing for a good organ is that every pipe should be adjusted to the room in which the organ sounds, so that the sounds are sweet and strong.'   Like many organists, Gubser, now 41, started with the piano.

  But at 12 he became entranced by the church organs in his native Zurich, and spent many years practising at the chapel in his boarding school. Later he studied the organ at the Zurich Conservatory, under the celebrated teacher and organist Eric Vollenwyder. He is now the concert organist for the Zurich Tonhalle, and has been the organist of the Catholic Main Church of Ss Peter and Paul since 1975.

  'The music of the organ is an old, rich world of sound,' he said. 'For me, it's like a country with colours, with seas and mountains.'    Gubser said it was images like these that inspired him as he played, rather than religious images more often associated with the instrument.

  'The organ stands in great rooms, and its music fills them,' he said. 'Churches and cathedrals have a very special feel to them, but it has not always been a church instrument.'   Gubser said the first known organ was made by a Greek engineer, Ktesibios, in the first century before Christ: 'It was much simpler than organs today and the pressure in the pipes was created by water.'   By the middle ages, organs made on the same principles of wind boxes and levers as those made today, were being installed in the great Gothic cathedrals of northern Europe. They really only became common during the Baroque period.

  'But organs were just as important in the secular world - and for centuries they were played at folk festivals and in the large houses on farming estates,' he said, adding that one of the biggest challenges for a touring organist was learning to know the instrument.

  'Every organ is an individual. It's not like pianos - I could play a Steinway in the Zurich Tonhalle or in Stuttgart and they would be very similar. But getting to know an organ is different.

  'You have to make it your friend: there is always the danger that it could be your enemy.'   Gubser said there were some, very old organs which were difficult to play and a room with bad acoustics was just as bad. 'It is a big challenge to find the possibilities in a bad instrument, or to bring something good into a room that is no good acoustically,' he said.

  On occasion, Gubser has found himself performing on an electric organ. 'When there is an entirely electric sound, without the use of pipes, it is not very interesting,' he said. 'But last year I did a concert tour of Slovakia, which included some concerts in the villages. It is a very poor area.

  'Many of the villages could not afford to maintain a pipe organ, but they loved the music.

  'I was asked to play on an electronic computerised organ and they were so keen, that I couldn't just say 'no, I don't play that'.

  'But normally I wouldn't touch it.'   He said the organ had been getting bad press recently with the concert-going public because of its strict association with church music.

  But his programme for Hong Kong was designed to challenge such prejudices and demonstrate the versatility of the organ.

  All the works are by French Romantic composers. But there, Gubser says, the similarity ends. 'Although they were all written in the 19th century, they are all very different,' he said.

  One piece, entitled Variations de Concert in E minor, is by Joseph Bonnet who was the organist at Saint Eustache in Paris.

  'He was one of the first organists to make a great concert tour in the United States,' Gubser observed. 'The piece is like a musical tour of all the combinations and colours of the organ and at the end there is a pedal solo.'   The pedal solo, Gubser explained, meant that his feet played four notes together at any one time - two from the toe tips and two from the heel - moving along the complicated pedal board. 'It is an extremely difficult thing to play,' he said.

  Another highlight of the programme on Friday will be a composition by Louis Vierne, 'the blind organist of Notre Dame'. The work, Carillon de Westminster in D, was composed for an English organ builder.

  'It is a fantasy based on the famous tune of Big Ben,' he said. 'Vierne was aiming to make the sounds to seem as if the great bells are ringing in the concert hall - and the vibrations that the organ makes in this piece really does bring the sense of huge bells.'   He will be closing the concert with Charles-Marie Widor's Symphonie No 6 in G minor. 'It is a great work,' he said. 'Widor was really the founder of the French romantic organ symphony and when he wrote the sixth symphony it was really like nothing else that had ever been written before.'   Widor played the organ at Saint Sulpice in Paris. 'He was the teacher of Marcel Dupre, who was the great teacher of my teacher, Eric Vollenwyder,' Gubser said, adding that this tracing of generation to generation was how the pleasure and skill of organ music had been passed on for many centuries.

Felix Gubser Organ Recital, Cultural Centre Concert Hall, tomorrow 8pm. Tickets from Urbtix, tel: 2734-9009 



Pedal power makes rich music