Thanks to Ron’s Log, I have heard the Ride of the Valkyries played on a magnificent pipe organ in St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church in Mahtomedi, Minnesota, which is northeast of Minneapolis and obviously a rather wealthy community, judging by the pipe organ. The quality of the video is a bit grainy: sometimes it looks like there was water in the lens. But the most interesting factoid is this: the organist confessed that, as it would take three organists at the console to play his transcription, he merely fed the MIDI scores into the organ console and used it as if it were a player piano…er…organ.
I enjoyed it; there is something of the plodding of a herd of horses mechanically galloping down the road in this transcription—not hysteria, or wildness, just the inevitability of the march of time and calamity that is to come.
Looking at the church’s website, it seems as though it wouldn’t be very welcoming to the likes of me, and the offer of contemporary worship makes me shudder, but at least they have an organ suitable for the highest worship style.