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Cameron Carpenter's Organic Cool

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Cameron Carpenter brings his organist showmanship to L.A.'s First Congregational Church on Sunday

The player with a flair for dramatic performances and glitzy outfits gives a prelude to his Disney Hall debut next season.

The pipe organ's massive physical dimensions and its potential for earthshaking sonorities make it an instrument like no other. But those who play its multiple keyboards, pump its many pedals and pull its multifarious stops are another matter.

Popularly regarded as repressed or freakish (think Simon Stimson in Thornton Wilder's “Our Town"), organists may be the music world's least glamorous artists. Unlike pianists or violinists, who can show off on stage, organists generally have their backs to audiences and often sit high up in lofts.

Enter Cameron Carpenter, a 29-year-old Pennsylvanian now living on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Part Liberace, part Liszt, he is determined to alter prevailing attitudes toward the organ, and if that means annoying his peers, so much the better.

Carpenter, who is scheduled to appear Sunday at First Congregational Church in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles and make his Walt Disney Concert Hall debut next season, is widely listed among the most gifted organists of his generation.

“The technical virtuosity is beyond imagining," said Scott Cantrell, classical music critic of the Dallas Morning News and himself an organist. “He can do things with his fingers and feet that nobody else can do. It's a very kaleidoscopic approach to sound."

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