Music at King's Chapel
The musical tradition of King's Chapel dates back to 1713 when the church became the first in New England to acquire an organ. The current C.B. Fisk instrument, King's Chapel's sixth organ, was installed in 1964.
Among the important musical events in the life of the young nation that took place at King's Chapel was the first "musical festival" in New England, held here on January 10, 1786. It took the form of a lengthy concert during the Morning Prayer service, including excerpts from Handel's Messiah. The newly founded Handel & Haydn Society gave its first public performance at King's Chapel on Christmas Day, 1815, and remains the oldest continuously performing arts organization in the United States.
The present music program at King's Chapel consists of service music, a Sunday concert series, and a Tuesday recital series. King's Chapel Music is a member of the Boston Choral Consortium.
The King's Chapel Choir and Director Heinrich Christensen
(image by Stu Rosner)
King's Chapel's Music Director, Heinrich Christensen
(image by Stu Rosner)
For more information, contact the Music Director at King’s Chapel House, 64 Beacon Street; 617-227-2155 x345.
Service Music
The King's Chapel Choir, consisting of 18 professional singers under the direction of Heinrich Christensen, sings at Morning Prayer on Sundays at 11:00 a.m. and major holiday services from September through May. Approximately once a month, volunteers from the congregation are invited to join the choir for the Sunday morning service. During the summer months, individual choir members function as soloists and cantors for Sunday services.
A midweek prayer service with a five- to ten-minute organ prelude is held every Wednesday at 12:15 p.m. On the third Wednesday of every month, the midday communion service features a soloist from the choir or a guest instrumental soloist.
As the first three-manual tracker action organ built by an American firm in the twentieth century, Opus 44 was a milestone instrument.
Although an otherwise new instrument, the organ has a number of stops that contain pipes from the previous instrument. Three mixtures and a Fifteenth, which were placed in the old organ by C. B. Fisk in 1960, were revoiced for the new organ. The Pedal Trombone combines old resonators with new shallots, tongues, and boots; the Pedal Open Bass, wood flutes, strings, and some other stops were also modified and revoiced for the new organ.
The case, a replica of the church’s 1756 organ, is placed well forward in the gallery with the Great and the Choir speaking toward the front. Located above and behind the Great, the Swell has separately controllable openings facing both forward and backward. The Pedal is within the main case beneath the Swell and speaks mainly to the back wall. Newly constructed of hard plaster, this wall functions as an efficient reflector and gives the sound projected rearward a quality distinguished from the forward projected sound.
Although the organ was a success, as the years went by Charles Fisk became increasingly dissatisfied with certain stops in the organ. The Choir Mixture was modified only a few years after the completion of the organ, and in 1979 a new mixture of larger scale was provided in place of the Swell Sharp. A year later the Trumpet 8' and Clarion 4' of the Great, which had been purchased from an Austrian firm and from the beginning had been judged too thin and unblending, were replaced by a larger scale French-style Trumpet and an 8' Cromorne, both made in the Fisk pipe shop.
News in Music at King's Chapel
The Florestan Recital Project has just released a new CD set, Songs of Daniel Pinkham, featuring the organ-playing of our own music director, Heinrich Christensen on Volume II. The CD release was celebrated at King's on Sunday, November 2nd. Boston Globe reviewer Matthew Guerrieri describes the concert - drawn from Volume II of the CD set - as "striking," with "serpentine harmonies, redolent with ear-tickling dissonance, but decisively tonal." Guerrieri further describes Pinkham's "Three Canticles From Luke" as "a testament of musical faith." The CDs are available at the Church or through the King's Chapel Bookstore, individually or as a set.
