Organ Matinee: Isabelle Demers

She has an “immaculate technique” and thrills audiences around the globe with her “breath-taking virtuoso performances.” This is the Fédération Québécoise des Amis de l’Orgue’s verdict on Isabelle Demers, who took her Doctorate at the Juilliard School and currently teaches as Organ Professor at McGill University in Montreal. For her long-awaited debut on the Karl Schuke organ at the Philharmonie Berlin, the Canadian concert organist famous for her “outstandingly sensitive playing” has chosen Bach’s Organ Sonata No.6 in G major BWV 530 – a work regarded as one of the pinnacles of the instrumental trio due to its masterful compositional technique. Here Demers interleaves Bach’s Organ Sonata with the Suite for organ, violin and cello, op. 149 by Josef Rheinberger, in which Bach’s counterpoint meets the Classical and Romantic traditions: an exceptionally sonorous piece based on continuous intensification. The evening concludes with Max Reger’s emphatic Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H op. 46, probably the best-known and most frequently performed work on this famous sequence of notes, ending in a powerful double fugue.