Glamorous organist working on grand designs

Cameron Carpenter. Photo / Supplied

Visit Cameron Carpenter's website and you could be bowled over by the glamour and glitz. The American may be described as the Horowitz of the organ, but Liberace might seem more of a soul-brother.

As for those glittering runs that the original Mister Showmanship dispensed with bejewelled fingers, Carpenter can do the same with his feet, his sequined shoes flitting over the pedals in Chopin's Revolutionary Etude.

Online, talking to CBS's Sunday Morning, he plays with his pet cat, explains how he needs almost four litres of milk daily to get his 5000 calories and is even happy to be called the bad boy of the pipe organ. When I catch up with him, a week before his appearance with the NZSO National Youth Orchestra, he is unexpectedly tetchy.

My first mistake is asking how important the flamboyant Virgil Fox might have been in turning him on to the organ. "Absolutely unimportant," is the clipped answer. "I have no remote interest in almost anything that has to do with the organ's past.

"The competition is the past," he continues. "The organ is in need of a dramatic reinvention, one that is only possible after its effective death, which I regard as having taken place at the end of the 20th century."

I discover that, despite his reeling off everything from Schubert's Erlking to a Sousa march in a New York church for last year's live DVD, he is no fan of church organs.

Far from being a venue of choice, a church is a "nonentity in terms of the musical market of the world," he says. "It is not a respected place for a pianist, a violinist or an orchestra and certainly not for an organist.

"The central sphere of my work is to make sure my career continues to ascend and that I continue to refine and develop the concept of what I want to be. I'm not dependent on pipe organs because they simply don't have a future."

It will be pipes for Carpenter when he plays in Auckland Town Hall next Saturday, but the American's ambition is for a pipe-free instrument, with two models custom-built in Berlin and Boston.

"It will be the greatest organ in the world," he enthuses, "totally free of sonic limitations and any fixed entities which can't be changed without the ministrations of an army of overpriced organ-builders."

And, one presumes, it will be the perfect vehicle for his showy transcriptions, rescoring the music of Shostakovich, Rachmaninov and Chopin so the instrument can "transcend genres".

This young man, who features his own Serenade and Fugue on Bach alongside a selection of original Bach on the live CD, seems most interested in his own "compositional potential".

The success of his recent The Scandal for organ and orchestra proves that "audiences are crying out for vehemently coloristic romantic music".

Surprisingly, Carpenter does not have much to say about Samuel Barber's Toccata Festiva which he is due to play next Saturday.

"I don't know it well enough," he admits. "I'll have to wait until I'm able to work with the orchestra; inevitably they will inform my feeing.

"It would be professionally inappropriate for me to come floating in with a grand concept in mind."

Performance

What: NZSO National Youth Orchestra

Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Saturday September 3 at 8pm