Jiyang Chen
Zelek studied under Grammy award winner Paul Jacobs at Juilliard.
On a rainy night in November, 26-year-old Greg Zelek, the Madison Symphony Orchestra’s new principal organist and curator of the symphony’s Overture Concert Organ, played a recital at the First United Methodist Church in downtown Madison.
While some people consider organ music dreary, Zelek’s interpretations of Bach, Mendelssohn, Guilmant and Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona were fresh and alive.
Seeing and hearing Zelek in action helps explain why praise follows the organist everywhere.
The South Florida Classical Review wrote of his “effortless facility on the instrument.” The Diapason, a magazine that selects the most successful young artists in the field, chose him as one of the top “20 under 30” organists in 2016. MSO’s music director, John DeMain, describes him as “simply a phenomenal virtuoso on the instrument.”
He began his position with the symphony in September after former principal organist and curator Samuel Hutchison retired after 16 years. As curator of the MSO’s 174-ton Klais organ, Zelek will oversee what was believed to be the heaviest movable object in any theater in the world when it was assembled in Overture Hall in 2004.
When we met in the MSO offices, Zelek praised Sam Hutchison for getting the organ program where it is today. “I’m not looking to come in and fix anything,” he says. “I just want to continue the good work that Sam started.” But Zelek’s special goal is to create a craving in the community for the organ’s legendary repertoire.
Prior to his appointment with the MSO, he was music director and organist of the Episcopal Church of St. Matthew and St. Timothy in New York City, but his musical roots go back to Miami, Florida, where he began taking piano lessons at age 7. “My parents were lawyers and neither were musicians,” says Zelek. “But my grandfather on my mother’s side played piano by ear and encouraged my parents to give me piano lessons when he noticed I could pick out tunes on the piano by ear.”
In middle school he took lessons from a piano teacher who also played organ, and by age 15 he was music director and organist for Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Miami, earning $4,500 a year. “It sounded like a million dollars at the time,” he laughs.
He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Juilliard School in New York City where he typically practiced until 3 a.m. daily. He is also in the process of finalizing Juilliard’s Artist Diploma, a program for unusually gifted performers.
Grammy award-winning organist Paul Jacobs, Zelek’s organ teacher at Juilliard, is his primary mentor. “Paul has paved the way for young organists to have professions and he has a vision for the instrument,” Zelek says. When he worried about whether he would make it in the field, Jacobs encouraged him to stick with it and the rest would follow. “My parents probably wouldn’t have chosen this path for me — or the path of being a Marine for my brother,” says Zelek. “But they let my siblings and me follow our passions and now we’re doing what we love.”
Now that he’s settling in Madison, Zelek says that he can’t imagine living anywhere else in the world. “Playing here is like playing for family,” he says. “And I’ve never had a warmer reception than I’ve had at the Madison Symphony Orchestra.”
Zelek will play at the MSO’s February 17 Free Community Hymn Sing, in concert with the MSO May 4-6, and in a solo recital on May 11. All performances will be in Overture Hall.
