Announcing Opus 5
Saint John’s Abbey Organ Builders is pleased to announce the signing of a contract for our Opus 5: a new pipe organ for St. Louis Bertrand Church in Louisville, Kentucky. Installation is scheduled for 2029.
St. Louis Bertrand Church, a Roman Catholic parish founded in 1866 by the Dominican friars, continues to be served by the Dominican community today. The parish is led by its pastor, Fr. Bernard M. Timothy, O.P., with Christopher Mueller as music director and Dr. Christopher Holman serving as organ consultant.
The new organ will feature 36 stops across three manuals and pedal, offering a colorful tonal palette with maximum dynamic flexibility and nuance. Its tonal design draws inspiration from 19th century German builders such as Carl August Buchholz and Friedrich Ladegast. Their influence will be distilled and creatively combined with select elements from other regional styles, resulting in an instrument both historically informed and artistically original.
This approach is intended to support the liturgical and musical life of St. Louis Bertrand Church in exemplary fashion. The organ will provide sensitive accompaniment for cantor, schola, choir, and congregation, while also being capable of rendering a broad range of the organ’s rich repertoire and inspiring liturgical improvisation.
While we propose to adopt certain tonal features of 19th century German Romantic organs, we also believe it is possible to blend and incorporate these features in a way that allows us freedom in choosing the best design, construction, and voicing techniques toward the most musical end. For instance, there are some features of the historical German Romantic organ that we would not want to emulate, such as terraced dynamics between and within divisions. Instead, both the Hauptwerk and Nebenwerk divisions will be placed under swell expression, offering endless nuance and shading of tone colors while preserving classical balance and flexibility within and between divisions.
A distinctive feature of this project will be the inclusion of a Physharmonika, a set of “free reed” stops played from a third manual and located in the console. Free reeds have a gentle onset of tone like bel canto singing, and further to that end, the two Äoline stops will be dynamically expressive on a subtle, human scale through variable wind pressure.
The organ will be played from a low-rise, detached console with touch-sensitive mechanical key action and flexible electric stop action. It will be housed in a neo-Gothic hardwood case, harmonizing with both the organ’s tonal character and the English Gothic architecture and decorative details of St. Louis Bertrand Church.