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By Christine Rappleye, Church News
Current and emeritus Salt Lake Tabernacle organists will be performing on the new Létourneau concert organ at Brigham Young University School of Music Concert Hall on Tuesday, March 11, at 7:30 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time. Tickets for the live event have been mostly distributed (see the BYU Tickets website for availability and cost), and the concert will be livestreamed online through musicstreaming.byu.edu.
Performers for “Pieces of Eight” are current organists Richard Elliott, Andrew Unsworth, Brian Mathias, Linda Margetts and Joseph Peeples, and emeritus organists John Longhurst, Clay Christiansen and Bonnie Goodliffe.
The concert is part of the Concert Hall Organ Inaugural Series for the new organ in the recently completed School of Music Concert Hall. The series began in October 2024 and will continue through August and includes a variety of performers and events. See organ.byu.edu/concert-hall-series for information.
Létourneau Opus 100 Organ
The Opus 100 organ was built, installed and named by Létourneau Pipe Organs based in Quebec in June and July of 2024.
The four-manual, 81-rank organ has two consoles — one in the center of the pipework facade and a movable stage console. It has more than 4,600 pipes that range from 32 feet to the length of a pencil.
BYU’s organ faculty has been involved in planning for the organ since 2016. Létourneau Organs was selected in 2017 to design and build the organ that took two and a half years and the expertise of 25 full-time craftspeople and specialists, according to BYU.
Each organ is a “custom work of art for each location,” said Andrew Forrest, the president and artistic director of Létourneau Organs, in a video about the organ.
BYU organ professor Don Cook called it the “crown jewel” of the new building.
“As you enter the Concert Hall, the organ façade pipes strike you as the focal point. The random jagged lines, created by the pipe tops, reflect the mountaintops that are seen through the east glass wall of the Music Building,” Cook said in a news release from BYU. This effect is “echoed with the tubular chandeliers of various lengths and positions in the foyer. We made a concerted effort to bring the mountains into the hearts of the music students as a means of renewal.”
The School of Music’s performance and academic spaces are in a newly constructed building on 900 East, at the south end of the parking lot and east of the BYU law school. Construction began in June 2020. It includes the 1,000-seat Concert Hall, the 250-seat Recital Hall, a Choral Hall for the school’s choral groups, Studio Y for recordings, and other practice, rehearsal and ensemble rooms.
The Harris Fine Arts Center, which previously housed the School of Music, has been demolished and a new arts building for the College of Fine Arts and Communications is being constructed.
Other Notable Organs
The Tabernacle organists regularly perform on the organs in the Salt Lake Tabernacle and the Conference Center. The Salt Lake Tabernacle organ has 11,623 pipes, 147 stops and 206 ranks, or sets of pipes. The Conference Center’s Schoenstein organ has 7,667 pipes, 130 ranks of pipes and five keyboards. The Assembly Hall organ has 3,489 pipes.
Also, the organ at Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City’s Cathedral of the Madeline has 4,066 pipes. The Tabernacle and Cathedral of the Madeline organists perform together in an annual Organ Fest.
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