One of the unobviously startling things about All You Need Is Bach (Sony), Cameron Carpenter's new CD, is that it's the organist's first all-Bach recording, or the first all-Bach recording on his self-designed International Touring Organ (ITO). Or something. Pretty much everything else about it is startling in all the usual, obvious ways.
As regular (and otherwise) habitues of Davies Hall can attest, Carpenter �" who "reads" gay to most people, in no way denies his sexual interest in men but identifies as "radically inclusive" in the sexual-orientation category �" is as flamboyant a showman as today's "classical music" world has to offer, a trait not unheard of in previous American organists but taken to new dimensions by this 35-year-old American. Jean-Yves Thibaudet's trademark red socks cannot begin to compete.
But Carpenter is, in no particular order, a consummate technician, a man on a mission and a self-styled, self-described "revolutionary." The thunder that follows the lightning makes an even greater impact. With artistic proclivities at least as radically inclusive as his carnal ones, he's an object lesson in how vastly far beyond the Three B's music ventures �" a trait, it bears noting, of the greatest musicians. His B1 has the seriousness of Ferruccio Busoni and the singularity of Glenn Gould, both amplified (literally, too, of course) by the abandon of our tech-mad age. It's a ride.
The point of his self-designed International Touring Organ, completed by Marshall & Ogletree in 2014, is that it allows him, unusually for a concert organist, an intimate relationship with a particular performing instrument, and to tour with it. In the accompanying booklet, Carpenter explains it as fully as a lay reader could take in. But (and here is the full Carpenter) this new CD was recorded in Berlin's Jesus-Christus-Kirche, one of the world's premiere recording venues.
Musicians have always gravitated to, and from, Bach, but it's startling the degree to which �" specifically in recordings �" solo-instrument Bach is again ubiquitous, core. Smart musicians, including Carpenter, don't minimize the significance of historically informed performance on our understanding of Bach, but no musician in her right mind today would claim that Bach is absolute music, or that there is one right way to perform it �" or perform it without the most deeply personal spin.
Seconds into the Contrapuntus IX from The Art of the Fugue, which opens the disc, you're up to your ears with the fury (but not rage) of Carpenter's playing. It's a work for which Bach left few specific performing instructions (including what instrument to play), and Carpenter attacks it fingers flying, with registration as saturated as the music could bear. Yet what stands out is not the welter of sound but its pellucidity.
The intricate ITO software allows Carpenter to change the organ's tuning �" its sound world, basically �" between works, and the only didactic aspect of this recording is that he plays each of the pieces in a different tuning, which you don't need to be any kind of instrumental expert to appreciate. Two Organ Trio Sonatas, in D minor and E-flat Major, some of the densest and most inwardly coiled of Bach's compositions, exude specific character to an uncommon degree. Not surprisingly, that makes the concentrated following of their intricacies vastly more inviting.
Did I mention that Carpenter is, in some circles, controversial? Part of his radically inclusive program on this disc is the appropriation of one of Bach's most beloved pieces for harpsichord (oops, or piano), the Fifth French Suite in G Major, in his own transcription for organ. It's the kind of thing Bach did all the time, and Carpenter does it fearlessly and with an exuberant, wholesale lack of modesty. It's at the very least ear-cleansing, and I found it revelatory.
But keeping organ freaks happy means reaching for the sonorities found nowhere else, and nowhere does Carpenter conjure more sheer magic than in the B-Minor Prelude and Fugue, BWV 544. The Prelude alone �" which opens and closes at a dynamic near inaudibility, and rambles around some of those organ sounds a former boyfriend of mine called "spook house" �" is spellbinding. The Fugue is a model of clarity that begins in sonic earnest and then, like its harbinger, transmutes into an intricate knot in antique silk and hikes high up Mt. Messiaen. The view is fabulous, but take oxygen.
Modern ears wrestle with the "churchy"-sounding chorale preludes, and Carpenter lands on one no less intimidating and theologically less au courante than "O Mensch, bewein dein' Suende gross" ("Man, lament your great sins"). If you can check your vestigial religious guilt at the door, it's one of the disc's most involving episodes.
The Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, the best-known piece on the disc, comes through with the requisite fireworks. But Carpenter signs off with humor. His arrangement of the Invention No. 8, which the Beatles used as a sign-off to the tune "All You Need Is Love," is a raucous, Charles Ives-ish take that starts with a drumroll and then rolls through the rest of the "orchestra," breathlessly. No one would call this "centric," but it's not just show. It makes you listen.