Melbourne’s main concert hall is missing a vital feature – a grand organ – and has been for a decade. Ten years on from a $130 million redevelopment which saw the existing organ removed there are no plans to replace it, a situation Melbourne’s foremost organists call scandalous, a nightmare and morally reprehensible.
Construction of the Melbourne Concert Hall – later called Hamer Hall – July 26, 1979.Credit: The Age Archive
Hamer Hall, part of the Victorian Arts Centre, had a pipe organ when it was built 40 years ago, but the underpowered instrument was removed during the refurbishment and is now believed to be sitting damaged in storage in the eastern suburbs. Hamer Hall is almost unparalleled among the world’s leading concert halls in not having an organ.
Instead, when a work requires it – such as December’s Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performances of Handel’s Messiah – an electronic organ is played through the hall’s PA system, controlled by technicians with a mixer. This deprives audiences of a proper organ’s resounding deep notes and the organist of the freedom of their instrument.
Organists call these digital instruments “pop-up toasters”. Composer and organist Calvin Bowman, the usual performer for the MSO, says: “It’s a living nightmare. I remember very early on having conversations with MSO management saying this is unacceptable.
“All the musicians come out with their instruments and I have to sit on this thing and look like a doofus and sound bad. I don’t want to sound bad, I know how to make an organ sound good, but you can’t with these things.”
Worse, Bowman says, when the organ was taken out for the refurbishment there were guarantees it would be replaced; failure to do so is “morally reprehensible. We’re sick to death of this.”
‘All the musicians come out with their instruments and I have to sit on this thing and look like a doofus.’
Calvin Bowman from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, on being forced to play an electric organ
Digital instruments can have technical or human failures. Organ expert John Maidment tells of a school speech night where the organist had arranged a program of music using a digital organ. “When the speeches stopped, the people managing the PA system turned everything off and went home, and she put her hands on the keys and there was nothing.”
Arts Centre management says there is no demand for an organ and that its key tenant, the MSO has had little, if any, use for the organ. Melanie Smith, executive director, performing arts, told The Age their focus was firmly on delivering the first stage of the refurbishment of the theatres building, a long-term project. “Revisiting the notion of reinstalling an organ to Hamer Hall cannot be accommodated as a priority in the near future,” she said.
Arts Centre CEO Karen Quinlan wrote in a December email to a supporter hoping to establish an organ fund that “to reintroduce an organ to the venue would today require substantial construction works, closure of the venue for many months, significant cost and result in a long period of disruption to presenters and audiences”.
But all these comments are disputed by top organists and by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra itself, which acknowledges there are many works with organ it would like to program but cannot.
Melbourne’s Hamer Hall. Credit: Mark Gambino
“Hamer Hall has been our home for 40 years, and we have a wonderful relationship with Arts Centre Melbourne, but it’s such a shame that it has now been without an organ for over ten years,” says the MSO’s director of programming, John Nolan.
“A pipe organ is a vital part of any great concert hall. So much of the standard symphonic repertoire includes it and there’s also an amazing repertoire of concertos for organ. We use a digital organ sometimes but there’s a lot of music we simply can’t program at Hamer Hall.”
Does the MSO want a new organ? “Absolutely, and this is often on our agenda with the Arts Centre. This is something we mention to them quite often,” Nolan says.
John Maidment was a member of the Arts Centre’s musical instruments committee when the first organ was commissioned in the late 1970s. Unfortunately it was designed and built before the building was completed and the acoustic known, and organists agree that while it was a beautiful instrument it was unsuited to the hall and under-powered. “In a cathedral it would have been fantastic,” Maidment says.
Organist Douglas Lawrence playing the organ he designed at Scots’ Church in Melbourne.Credit: Scott McNaughton
“I voiced a few doubts initially and was told to shut up [by other members of the committee].”
Maidment rejects the arguments against a replacement organ. “To say they haven’t got the money is ludicrous. Look at the extraordinarily large sums of money being spent on the State Theatre and the contemporary art gallery, but there is total inertia on this.”
He says the organ space in the refurbished hall is better than the previous space, and a new organ would be prebuilt and lifted into position. There also wouldn’t need to be the massive disruption cited by Karen Quinlan, he says. “The thing that does take time is the voicing of the pipes, but that can be done when the hall is closed at night time, that’s standard practice. You probably have 12 hours every day when that can be done.
“It might cost $5 million. The money’s immaterial really; you just need the will to do something.”
Experts say Hamer Hall cannot be considered a world-class orchestral venue until it has a real organ.
Another of Melbourne’s top organists, Douglas Lawrence, says he knew the old organ was inadequate within five seconds of seeing the specifications. “For a concert hall organ it was not loud enough. During the opening concerts I played the Saint-Saens symphony with the MSO and Hiroyuki Iwaki. And when we got to the loud bit, where the organ is supposed to annihilate the orchestra, Iwaki stopped the orchestra and said ‘more organ please, Mr Lawrence.’ And I said, ‘Mr Iwaki, I’m very sorry but there is no more organ.’ And he looked up and said, ‘ha, very funny. More organ please, Mr Lawrence.’ ‘Mr Iwaki I am playing with both feet, both hands and my nose. There is no more organ’.”
Lawrence, the music director at Scots’ Presbyterian Church and founder and director of the Australian Chamber Choir, has obtained quotes from leading organ builder Rieger of about 2.3 million Euros ($3.6m) for a new organ.
“It’s the weirdest thing. There’s been an indifference to it I find unfathomable, because there’s so many major works that cannot be performed as the composer intended.
“When [the MSO] do Mahler they bring an electronic keyboard in, and they just can’t do it. There’s the orchestra banging away, and the organ is supposed to fill and expand it, and there’s nothing there.
“You walk into most concert halls around the world and the first thing you see is the organ.”
Tony Way
“The orchestra players think it’s absurd. It’s just a piece of equipment that has to be there. It’s like having no double basses, it wouldn’t work,” Lawrence says.
Another noted organist, Age music critic Tony Way, says the situation is a scandal. “Hamer Hall can’t claim to be a world-class venue without a decent organ. Also, the view of the hall from the seats is terrible, because you have that plywood wall, a bland and uninviting view, when you go to a concert.”
Way complains that not only is the MSO unable to present certain works, and reduced to a “toaster” for those it does, but sometimes it just omits the organ part entirely, as in recent performances of Respighi’s Pines of Rome and Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony.
“We definitely need an instrument. We should invite some good companies to tender for the job and let’s see what can be done. And it would provide a visual focus for the hall – you walk into most concert halls around the world and the first thing you see is the organ,” Way says.
“Melbourne is supposed to be a wonderful city for the arts, but this is a notable lack.”
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