Paul Jordan

Concerts have taken Paul Jordan around the world for performances in more than a hundred cities on four continents and he has appeared on CBS nationwide television and National Public Radio. A native of New York City, Jordan received graduate music degrees from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Frankfurt am Main, the Yale School of Music in New Haven, CT, and the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. Jordan serves as a conductor, composer, performer, and educator in the New Haven area. A critic in Germany has said that Jordan’s playing provides “evocations of chamber music, melded with audacious, idiosyncratic tone colors and robustly pointed rhyhms into passionate and transcendent communication.”

Paul Jordan’s fascination with J.S. Bach’s late masterpiece, the “Art of the Fugue”, began when he was a teenager in New York and continued into his university years and beyond. He received a Solo Recitalist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to commit the opus to memory and devise his own version of it for organ. One of his first public renditions of the cycle took place in the context of the 1985 Bach Year commemorations at Helmuth Rilling’s Oregon Bach Festival and he has gone on to perform it to high acclaim in some fifty national and international venues.

THE INSTRUMENT. Named in tribute to the late Viennese virtuoso and composer, the “Anton Heiller Memorial Organ” selected for use on this recording was built by John Brombaugh and Associates for the Church of Seventh Day Adventists in Collegedale, Tennessee. Since its completion in 1986, it has been regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive instruments of its kind in the U.S. Its 4861 pipes -- tuned in “well temperament in the manner of J.S. Bach” -- are comprised of 70 stops distributed in 108 ranks over five divisions with key action, stop action, couplers and tremulants operated mechanically in accordance with historical practice.

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