Curtis Institute graduate Nathan Laube is a ‘One-Man Orchestra’

Globe-trotting concert organist and Curtis Institute of Music graduate Nathan Laube has performed on many of the world’s greatest pipe organs. He has played on historic organs in Germany and France, as well as on the famous Wanamaker Organ in Macy’s, Center City — the second-largest in the world. (The world’s largest pipe organ is in Atlantic City.)

This video is part of a series from New Jersey Arts News.

Globe-trotting concert organist and Curtis Institute of Music graduate Nathan Laube has performed on many of the world’s greatest pipe organs. He has played on historic organs in Germany and France, as well as on the famous Wanamaker Organ in Macy’s, Center City — the second-largest in the world. (The world’s largest pipe organ is in Atlantic City.)

Laube, 24, studied in Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship, and is currently Artist-in-Residence at the American Cathedral in Paris.

NJ Arts News caught up with him prior to a recent recital in the 7,000-seat Great Auditorium in Ocean Grove, N.J. Laube shared his fascination with the majestic sound and complexity of the “king of instruments,” and compared the five-keyboard, 11,000-pipe Ocean Grove organ to “the cockpit of an airplane.”

“Especially on a symphonic-style orchestral organ, you feel like the conductor of a one-man symphony,” Laube said.

The August 8, 2012, recital in Ocean Grove included Durufle’s Suite for Organ, a movement of Widor’s Symphony no. 5, and his own transcriptions of Mendelssohn’s Variations Serieuses and Liszt’s Les Preludes.

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