by Daniel Hathaway

“I try to design programs for non-organists,” Monica Berney said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C. earlier this week. “The idea that everyone wants to hear the old warhorses they learned in college is just not that interesting to me. I want to play programs for people.”

At Trinity Cathedral on Monday, November 6 at 7:30 pm, Berney will make use of both the Cathedral’s 1977 Flentrop organ and its 2022 Skinner / Aeolian-Skinner / Mueller instrument in a program largely devoted to transcriptions of works originally written for other musical media.

I caught up with the Curtis Institute and Rice University graduate on her cell phone during a busy week at her job at St. Paul’s, K Street that included a music gala and extra services for All Saints and All Souls Days. I led off with some questions about her Cleveland program.

Daniel Hathaway: You’ve put together a very entertaining program for Cleveland. It includes three of Brahms’ Opus 118 Sechs Stücke für Klavier, which are originally piano works. Organists who lament that the composer didn’t leave us more works for their instrument should be very interested to hear these pieces. [Read more…]