Organ Recital: Michael Bennett (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Michael Bennett, organist, composer, and improviser, lives and breathes music that pushes the boundaries and searches for new, powerful, and bold expression. He currently studies at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam for organ performance with Louis Robilliard and Matthias Havinga. As an organist, after studying piano since 4, Michael picked up the organ at the age of 9 and started his studies in the American symphonic tradition with Peter Conte, organist of the Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia. At the age of 15, Michael was invited to study the summer of 2015 in France, Studying with Johann Vexo and Jean Baptiste Robin in Nancy and Royaumont. Michael returned in 2017 to France to study there. Michael has also studied improvisation on the organ with Dorothy Papadakos, former organist at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. Michael has performed in historic venues in France, including Nancy Cathedral, La Chapelle Royale de Versailles, and Royaumont Abbaye. In the United States, he has performed many concerts at the historic Wanamaker Grand Court Organ, The Curtis Institute of Music, The Baryshnikov Center for the Performing Arts, The Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts, Carnegie Hall, and Longwood Gardens, where he performed Reger’s Symphoniche Fantasie at the age of 14. Michael is known and infamous for his adventurous programming of extremely demanding repertoire, including the major works of Reger (in particular Op. 57 and the mammoth Introduction, Variations and Fugue, Op. 73), transcriptions of whole French Baroque ballets de cour, playing the Trois chorales of César Franck in their original disposition of being played as a whole, and his ongoing project of learning the complete organ works of both Charels-Valentin Alkan and Louis Couperin. Michael was a National YoungArts Finalist in Organ Performance and Composition, 2016, and received First Place in the Queens, NY AGO Organ Competition. As a composer, Michael is “hyper-spectral”, using the spectral language of the natural overtones and pushing it further into psychoacoustic domains, while also combining his obsessive passion with French Baroque music via 64-limit extended just intonation in his works. He has written many works for ensemble, electronics, ensemble and electronics, large ensemble and electronics, orchestra, chamber, solo, choral, and organ that have been commissioned and played all over the world by ensembles such The Columbia New Music Ensemble, the New York Youth Symphony (where he was the aprentice composer last year), and the Ensemble Multilaterale in Paris, Including the premiere of his “...Appollon le Forma...” by Quatour TANA and the famed Nicolas Crosse (of the Ensemble InterContemporain) this summer at Universitie d’Altitude in France. Michael’s compositions have been performed at The Juilliard School, The Baryshnikov Center for the Performing Arts, and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute where Michael participated as their ASCAP Compositional Scholar after receiving the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award. In addition, Michael was awarded the Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award, and performed organ on NPR’s From the Top.