Organist Iveta Apkalna serves as an unwavering advocate for new music

Mozart famously declared the pipe organ “the king of instruments,” and its royal lineage reaches far into the past, back to ancient Greece. But Latvian organist Iveta Apkalna, who makes her Chicago Symphony debut Jan. 30-Feb. 4, is also deeply interested in the organ’s present and future.

She will be the soloist in the CSO premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Sinfonia concertante for Organ and Orchestra, a work she premiered in Poland in 2023 with Salonen on the podium. Salonen conducts the Chicago concerts, which also include a Richard Strauss tone poem, Don Juan, and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.

Based in Berlin, Apkalna is resident organist at the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg. She performs extensively in Europe and the United States in recitals and concerts with major orchestras. In 2023, she was artistic director of an organ festival in Taiwan. The great Baroque and Romantic-era organ works are certainly in her repertoire. But she doesn’t fit the archetype of an organist solely focused on Bach or sacred music. In 2015, she released a CD pairing music of J.S. Bach and Philip Glass. In a recent, animated interview from Berlin, her enthusiasm for new music bubbled over.

“I think it is really quite natural,” she said. “We have to live not just in the time which is given to us. We have to use it in the best possible way in order to let the generations after us talk about this time. We have to see this time we’re living in as a kind of mirror, which only we — who live now, in this time — can really understand.

“Therefore, I think performing contemporary music, talking in the language of contemporary music, and collaborating with contemporary composers is very natural. Because who, if not we? I am in this world, and I want to talk with the language of this world to the next generations.”

Apkalna has given the world premieres of organ works by composers including Pascal Dusapin and Péter Eötvös. In residence at the Elbphilharmonie since the strikingly designed hall opened in 2017, she regularly suggests composers for future commissions. But commissioning new organ music is risky business.

“Basically, you never know,” she said with a resigned laugh. “You just never really know. We have to confirm [the commission] and accept [the work] long before the concerto is finished. Sometimes it turns out to be very, very pleasant, a great surprise, really fitting your temper and your needs and your personality. And sometimes not at all.

“We can choose when we play a score by Bach, Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Philip Glass,” she said. “It already exists. We can say, ‘This I like. This I dislike. This is me. This is not me. This is the language I want to speak to my audience.’ But with pieces you’ve never seen before, you never know.”

Salonen’s Sinfonia concertante was one of those happy surprises, even though it was his first-ever organ work.

“For many, many years it was my idea to ask him because I knew his music,” she said. “Esa-Pekka had never composed for organ before, but this was one of the reasons why I wanted to ask him to accept this commission even more. And lucky we, lucky us, he did.”

"Every note is me — I understand, I know, I like, I want. It’s a great, great piece of music and so organistic, so organ-like. It all ways, it fits that king and queen of instruments.” — Iveta Apkalna on Salonen’s Sinfonia concertante

Apkalna considers working with composers new to the organ to be a fascinating process.

“Many composers often say, ‘We’ll work together. I’ll be sending you some things. You might play them, and then you’ll comment.’ But I would say in 90 percent of the cases, I receive almost completed material that I don’t want to [change]. They’re all so willing to collaborate in the process. But in the end, they just do. They have these inspirational moments, and it just flows. And I understand. I’m very thankful they follow their intuition.”

For Apkalna, Salonen’s piece was a matter of love at first sight.

“I just take this music, and I play it and every note is me — I understand, I know, I like, I want. It’s a great, great piece of music and so organistic, so organ-like. It all ways, it fits that king and queen of instruments.”

The royal instrument is exceptionally demanding, however. Every concert-hall organ has the same basic components — keyboards, pedals, pipes. But one organ may have thousands of pipes, another organ only a few hundred. How the air travels through those pipes to create sound varies widely. Organs can produce the full range of orchestral color, from rumbling double basses to high flying flutes. But, as Apkalna puts it, “flute in Hamburg sounds very different from flute in Chicago.”

“Each organ is completely different,” she said. “It’s like we human beings. We all have a right hand and a left hand, right foot, left foot, but we are each so different. I say to my colleagues who play the piano, ‘You open the piano. You touch the key, and it sounds. You just have to think about how you want to touch the key, how to release it, how it sounds in the hall.’ For us organists, nothing happens when I touch the key. Nothing. Because first I have to test and try each individual register, every stop of the organ.”

Apkalna will need at least eight hours, she said, to prepare Salonen’s piece on the CSO’s organ.

“Time, time, time,” she said with a resigned sigh. “A lot of time and even more than a lot of time, which is exactly what we never get enough of.”

Apkalna studied piano while growing up in Riga, Latvia’s capital, and later at the London Guildhall School of Music and Drama. But it was destiny, she believes, that led her to the organ. Born in 1976, she grew up when Latvia belonged to the Soviet Union. She listened to organ records in her mother’s vast LP collection. But not until 1990-91, when Latvia separated from the Soviet Union, had she ever seen an organ or heard it played.

“The organs were hidden in the churches,” she said, “but the churches were closed. We were not allowed freely to go to church. I listened to the recordings. I felt this organ exists, but it’s only somewhere far away, very high, unreachable to me.”

In her mid-teens, as a student at Riga’s leading music academy, she decided to give the organ a try when the school added an organ department. “I was the first organ student in newly independent Latvia,” she said proudly. “I fell in love with the organ immediately.

“You never know,” she mused, “where destiny will take you.”