Grant Smith is an organ master's degree student at Rice University in Houston, Texas, USA in the studio of Ken Cowan. He performs regularly as organ soloist across Texas and California. Recent competition successes include First Prize at the 2022 Feith International Organ Competition in Blieskastel, Germany, First Prize in the 2023 Hall Organ Competition in San Antonio, Texas, and semi-finalist in international competitions in Tokyo and Seoul in 2023. He is a sought-after collaborative performer on organ, piano, and harpsichord. Grant received two bachelor’s degrees in music and civil engineering from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California. A two-time winner of the university's concerto competition, he performed as featured soloist with the Cal Poly Symphony both on organ and piano. Grant is currently organist and pianist at West University Baptist Church in Houston and organist and pianist for the Houston Masterworks Chorus.
OMGoddess this performance is playing ceaselessly in my heart, and throughout all my musical sensuous comprehension. I've repeated it 11 times already. Stunning technique, and rather an ingenious indeed "sexy" arrangement, my dearest GS! Thank you. Love andrea.
Absolutely brilliant. OMG, your Hauptwerk organ is beautiful. WOW! That must have cost quite a lot of money. Your playing & interp alone is astonishing & fantastic, but HUGE kudos playing it from memory. FUTU is perhaps my favorite Messiah chorus. I think the first time I heard it was as a child with Bernstein conducting it. It was one of the many wonderful selections of a volume the annual LP from Goodyear's GREAT SONGS of CHRISTMAS. I can't recall what year, but I've loved that chorus ever since that first hearing. Even the choral score reduction for accompanying a performance of Messiah with only organ (or piano) is fiendishly difficult. There is true genius in successfully playing orchestral reductions on organ for choral works. I am always amazed at the folks who are so adept & good at it. It's not just the ability to play these scores well, but to know how to register them well on the particular instrument one is playing. My late undergrad college organ professor was brilliant playing orchestral reductions & registering them. I will never forget his playing of the Verdi Requiem score & Bloch's Sacred Service & Brahm's Requiem on organ. He was a genius playing them & achieving the orchestral nuances & sounds of each score.
I was about to ask if this was the real organ you were playing on, and then I saw the cabinets and shelves behind you and realized it's just a very sweet setup you have in your home! haha That was a truly wonderful performance. Does the real organ look like the setup you have here, with the stop knobs and everything? :-)
👍 Uno dei migliori brani che abbia mai sentito!! La considero una melodia "alta che incide nei sentimenti e nello spirito". Tutto questo, grazie anche all'organista molto esperto!! Grazie mille che ci hai scacciato un po' di pensieri preoccupanti!!!
Finally, a performer who takes you to the music instead demanding attention for himself. He managed to actually do something with the introduction rather than just make noise. Articulate and comprehensible, this was a very mature performance. The tempo is likely what Reger himself would have employed, before Anthony Newman, Herbert von Carrion and the current British school of racing organists redacted organ performance history. Well done sir!
Because I’m seeing a lot of negative comments here, let me just clarify a few things: I recorded this on a midi keyboard and later rendered the audio through PianoTeq, a virtual instrument software. I apologize for the poor audio quality, I was simply using the best recording materials I had at the time. I was 18 when I recorded this, I was professionally oriented towards engineering and was not taking piano lessons. This was just a summer project and I was not expecting this many views. I have since invested thousands of hours in my playing, and my more recent videos are of much higher quality.
What a pleasant surprise to see one of my favorite pieces. I discovered this in my senior year of college and played it on my Bachelor's recital. Very well done, congratulations!
