Paul Jacobs — Streamed Performance

After an awe-inspiring appearance in 2018 with his all-Bach program, GRAMMY Award-winning organist (and my Juilliard professor) Paul Jacobs returns to Overture Hall to share the beauty of his musical insights into Handel’s Organ Concerti. Bookended by Mr. Jacobs’ arrangements of two of Handel’s Op. 4 Concerti for solo organ, the versatility of our Mighty Klais will be on full display with a program that will amaze all! – Greg Zelek

View this performance recorded LIVE from Overture Hall — streamed FREE to your home! Paul’s performance premieres on November 17 at 7:30 p.m., and can be watched through November 18, 2020. Register now.

Take note. You can also view Greg Zelek’s FREE streamed performance that premiered on October 13, through November 18, 2020. Register here.

About Paul Jacobs

Heralded as “one of the major musicians of our time” by Alex Ross of The New Yorker and as “America’s leading organ performer” by The Economist, the internationally-celebrated organist Paul Jacobs combines a probing intellect and extraordinary technical mastery with an unusually large repertoire, both old and new. He has performed to great critical acclaim on five continents and in each of the fifty United States. The only organist ever to have won a Grammy Award—in 2011 for Messiaen’s towering “Livre du Saint-Sacrément,”—Mr. Jacobs is an eloquent champion of his instrument both in the United States and abroad. No other organist is repeatedly invited as soloist to perform with prestigious orchestras, thus making him a pioneer in the movement for the revival of symphonic music featuring the organ. 

Mr. Jacobs made musical history at age 23 when he played Bach’s complete organ works in an 18-hour marathon performance on the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death. Mr. Jacobs has premiered works by Samuel Adler, Mason Bates, Michael Daugherty, Wayne Oquin, Stephen Paulus, Christopher Theofanidis, and Christopher Rouse, among others. 

Mr. Jacobs studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, double-majoring with John Weaver for organ and Lionel Party for harpsichord, and at Yale University with Thomas Murray. He joined the faculty of The Juilliard School in 2003, and was named chairman of the organ department in 2004, one of the youngest faculty appointees in the school’s history. He received Juilliard’s prestigious William Schuman Scholar’s Chair in 2007. In 2017 Mr. Jacobs received an honorary doctorate from Washington and Jefferson College.

“Paul Jacobs is one of the great living virtuosos… he is utterly without artifice”
– The Washington Post

“An obliterating performance by one of the major musicians of our time.”
– The New Yorker

Greg Zelek is the Madison Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Organist and the Elaine and Nicholas Mischler Curator of the Overture Concert Organ

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