BLUE CATHEDRAL
Saturday, April 18, 2026
7:30 PM | Wagner Noël Performing Arts Center
Gary Lewis, Conductor
Dr. Peter Martens, Organ
Hungarian March from The Damnation of Faust - Hector Berlioz
Side-by-side performance with local students.
blue cathedral - Jennifer Higdon
Symphony No. 3 in C Minor “Organ Symphony” - Camille Saint-Saens
Featuring a custom-built electric organ designed and performed by Dr. Martens!
CLICK TO READ THE CONCERT PROGRAM (page 36)
Tickets $12 - $83, Students $12 (plus venue fees)
CLICK TO PURCHASE TICKETS ONLINE
800-514-3849
Scheduled programs and individuals are subject to change. Ticketing is handled by the Wagner Noël Performing Arts Center - all ticketing, security, and venue policies apply.
2025-2026 SEASON SPONSORED BY:
Sharon & John Webb
CONCERT SPONSORED BY:
Gregg Blain
Mary Lou Cassidy
Martha & Paul Crump
MEET DR. PETER MARTENS...
Dr. Peter Martens serves on the faculty of Texas Tech University as Professor in the School of Music and Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts. His diverse research and performance activities include the pipe organ on which Dr. Martens performs weekly for worship services, and numerous times with Texas Tech Orchestra, Wind Ensemble, and Symphonic Band. A pianist since childhood, his on-the-job training as an organist at age 15 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula after some arm-twisting by parishioners at his minister father’s new congregation, when the regular organist was snowed in for multiple weeks during an especially snowy holiday season.
Coming to understand and appreciate the complex machinery that constitutes a pipe organ led him into the maintenance, renovation, and design of organs, in acoustic, electronic, and hybrid forms. His first custom-built, computer-driven organ appeared onstage at the Wagner Noël Performing Arts Center in 2014, in the shell of a 1958 Texas Tech practice organ that was otherwise destined for the scrap heap. Tonight's organ console dates from 1998, and looks identical to common church and home organs in use today. The sounds it produces, however, are those of a faraway instrument, located in the Abbey of Saint-Étienne in the northern French city of Caen. Although re-using the casework and some pipes from the mid-18th-century organ, the abbey’s current organ is the work of renowned organ builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, completed in 1885. Camille Saint-Saëns completed his Symphony No. 3 the following year; thus the Saint-Étienne organ reflects the state-of-the-art in French organs at the time of piece’s composition, and provides an excellent match for the organ timbres and technical capabilities that Saint-Saëns envisioned for this large-scale Romantic work. These distant sounds come to our ears through a sophisticated process of taking multiple sound samples from each of the organ’s 6000+ individual pipes onsite, and blending them together in a way that allow for the customization sonic features like reverberation for spaces like the one you’re sitting in tonight.
