Lenten Organ Recitals

Due to COVID-19, the March 22, March 29, and April 5 recitals have been cancelled.

The organists are coming, the organists are coming!

It’s First Baptist Church’s 29^th year of presenting its annual Lenten concerts featuring performances by area guest organists. Here’s this year's lineup:

• March 1: Christina Misner Rao , daughter of Rev. Peter and Susan Misner, studied piano and organ with Vira Tibbetts of Hallowell and Margaret Godfrey of Winthrop. She holds a Masters degree in Business Administration from Boston University and a teaching certificate from Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT. She is currently the accompanist for Kennebec Performing Arts Company (KPAC), Leavitt High School chorus, Monmouth Middle School chorus, and the organist/choir director at the Wayne Community Church.
• March 8: Anna Beth Rynders is a Maine native who studied piano with Thomas French and organ with John Fay, Municipal Organist, Portland, Maine. She received a Bachelor of Music degree from Westminster Choir College, Princeton, NJ where she studied organ with George Markey and minored in voice. She is currently keyboardist at the Universalist-Unitarian Church in Waterville
• March 15: Howard A.“Budge” Whalen attended Bates College, then Northeastern for a Masters; all while teaching, and being a school administrator. He later went to University of Maine for post graduate studies.Budge began piano lessons at seven, and organ lessons at 13; he has always had a passion for playing the organ. “It’s fun making music with the king of instruments,” he says. “There is pleasure in the sounds of beautiful music coming through a fine instrument of hundreds of pipes and having the sounds of heaven right among us.”
• March 22: Sharon Saunders, organist at the Pleasant Street United Methodist Church, a position she has held since 1993. A native of Pittsburgh, she studied organ as an undergraduate at Carnegie-Mellon University and completed graduate degrees in Musicology and Library Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Sharon is the Associate College Librarian for Systems and Bibliographic Services at Bates College, and Cara is working in Brooklyn.
• March 29: Ed Larson received his Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts, where he studied organ with Max Miller (Marsh Chapel) and George Faxon (Trinity Church) choral conducting with James Cunningham (Tanglewood) and Allen C. Lannom (assistant to Robert Shaw, Julliard School). As organist/pianist, Ed has served various churches in Massachusetts and Maine, and is currently organist at Penny Memorial Baptist Church, Augusta, ME. He has also been the accompanist for the Coda Chorus, Kennebec Performing Arts Company Chorus, The Capital Chorale, and numerous school music festivals. He is a published composer (USA and Sweden), and his choral works have been performed nationally and internationally.
• April 5: Jay Zoller, resident of Newcastle, Maine, is the Director of Music and Organist at South Parish Congregational Church in Augusta, Maine, where he plays the church’s historic 1866 E & GG Hook organ. Zoller is recently retired from the Andover Organ Company where he built and designed pipe organs. He has played concerts in Germany which included recitals in Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne. Recently he played programs in Wyoming and Nebraska in addition to New England.

Admission is free; donations are appreciated.