PORT ANGELES — Balint Karosi will perform a recital of pipe organ music by J.S. Bach at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church.
The free program is part of the new Margaret Graebner Series for pipe organ concerts at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church at 301 E. Lopez Ave., Port Angeles.
Donations are welcome and will go to fund facilities at the church, which has ample parking.
Karosi is a composer, conductor, church musician and clarinetist. Since winning the International Bach Competition in Leipzig in 2008, he has been recognized as one of the leading interpreters of the music of J.S. Bach worldwide, organizers said.
In 2020, he embarked on recording the complete organ works of J.S. Bach in 14 recitals on different organs in the U.S. and Europe. The series, designed by Christoph Wolff for Izumi Hall, Japan, is published on Balint’s YouTube channel, and will be released in a CD set.
He is one of few organists in North America to improvise regularly in recitals in authentic Baroque style, which is informed by his research in Baroque improvisation techniques of the 17th and 18th centuries, organizers said.
He has recorded five albums.
As an active composer, he has received commissions from the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Spectrum Symphony of New York, the New Hungarian Music Society (UMZE), Musiciens Libres, the Miskolc Symphony Orchestra, Anima Musica Chamber Orchestra, Antico Moderno, the Norfolk Festival Chorus, the Yale Philharmonia Orchestra, Canto Armonico and the Boston Choral Ensemble.
His opera, Lonely Hearts, won the Most Dramatic Opera award and audience vote at the 2020 Contemporary Opera Showcase at the Hungarian State Opera. The libretto, written by Hungarian playwright Almási András Tóth, is based on a true story of a fraudulent American dating service from the 1980s.
He currently serves as Cantor at Saint Peter’s Church in New York City, where he is artistic director of the Saint Peter’s Bach Collegium, which he founded in 2015 for annual performances of J.S. Bach’s Passions, cantatas, and to commission and premier new sacred repertoire.
Bálint was appointed to the faculty of the Organ Department at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre and Dance. He has been broadcast numerous times on American Public Media’s Pipedreams, as well as WGBH Boston and Bartók Rádio in Hungary.
