Lorenz Maycher (Founding Director of the East Texas Pipe Organ Festival)
LORENZ MAYCHER is Founding Director of the East Texas Pipe Organ Festival, an annual conference based in Kilgore, Texas featuring the Aeolian-Skinner organs designed and tonally finished by Roy Perry and installed by the Williams Family of New Orleans. A native of Oklahoma, Lorenz has studied organ with Margaret Lindsay, Thomas Matthews, William Teague, Clyde Holloway, and William Watkins, and is a graduate of Rice University. While a student at Rice, Lorenz won the Gibbons Prize in organ, placed first in the San Antonio Pipe Organ Competition, and won the Houston AGO’s Mary Ellen Bond Award. In 2004, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Sacred Music by St. Dunstan’s College, Providence, Rhode Island.
In 1989, Lorenz was a featured recitalist at the Organ Historical Society national convention held in New Orleans. He has since played for twelve OHS national conventions and was recipient of an OHS E. Power Biggs Fellowship in 1990. He has played over fifty recitals on the 1830 Appleton organ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and has appeared in recital in such places as Wichita State University, Rollins College, Irvine Auditorium (University of Pennsylvania), and Philadelphia’s Lord and Taylor Department Store (on the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ).
In recent years, Lorenz has participated in several projects devoted to the music of Leo Sowerby. In 1994 he recorded an all-Sowerby disc at First Presbyterian Church, Kilgore, for Raven Records. The following year he was invited by the Leo Sowerby Foundation to give the world premiere performance of Sowerby’s recently discovered 1958 Nostalgic Poem and Heroic Poem in a Washington, D.C. concert honoring organist William Watkins. He has played four of Sowerby’s five works for organ and orchestra, including the first performance in over forty years of Concert Piece in a concert with the Richmond Symphony and a performance of Classic Concerto with the Buffalo Philharmonic. In May 2007, at the invitation of the Leo Sowerby Foundation, he gave the world premiere of Sowerby’s Organ Concerto #2 in Omaha, Nebraska with the Omaha Symphony Chamber Orchestra. He currently serves as secretary/treasurer of The Leo Sowerby Foundation, also based in Kilgore, Texas.
Lorenz is active in restoring historic recordings and has released a number of compact discs of noted organists performing on Aeolian-Skinner organs. The list of artists includes Robert Anderson, Dora Poteet Barclay, Charles Callahan, Paul Callaway, Garnell Copeland, Ken Cowan, Catharine Crozier, Maurice and Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, George Faxon, Edgar Hilliar, Clyde Holloway, George Markey, Alexander McCurdy, Robert Owen, Roy Perry, Albert Russell, Alexander Boggs Ryan, Walt Strony, William Watkins, John Weaver, and others – all available from the website www.easttexaspipeorganfestival.com.
In addition to his recording projects, Lorenz has published a number of articles for the major pipe organ journals in this country. His interviews with Marilyn Mason, Thomas Richner, Albert Russell, William Teague, Robert Town and Nora Williams have appeared in The American Organist and The Diapason, and he is editor/compiler of the series of articles From the Dickinson Collection, for The Diapason.