Justin Bischof plays and improvises on the 4-manual, 65-rank organ built in 2017 by Klais Organs of Bonn, Germany, for the Episcopal Church of St. James the Less, during Bischof's tenure as music director and organist of the parish, and highly involved in designing and acquiring the organ.  The program:

Franz Liszt (1811-1886): Präludium und Fuge über den Namen BACH

Richard Wagner (1813-1883, arr. Bischof): March to the Holy Grail from Parsifal 

McNeil Robinson 1943-2015: Dismas Variations

McNeil Robinson: Hommage à Messiaen

Improvisations by Justin Bischof:
Plein Jeu

Praeludium in d moll

Scherzo Ostinato

Claire de Lune

Sur la Marseillaise

Taconic Toccata

Dans la Basilique Notre Dame de Montréal

Octatonic Scherzo

Justin Bischof: Improvised St. James Scarsdale Symphony

   I. Introduction - Allegro
   II. Sur les Flûtes et les Gambes
   III. Scherzo
   IV. Toccata & Fugue

This recording is dedicated with deep gratitude to the memory of my mentor and dear friend, McNeil Robinson II. His musical genius, generosity, and humanity profoundly shaped who I am as both a musician and a person.
Justin Bischof

Robinson’s musicianship joined virtuoso command of the instrument with a remarkable gift for improvisation. Contemporary accounts repeatedly cite his improvisational artistry, while his compositions reveal a musician equally at home in concert, Christian liturgical, and Jewish liturgical traditions. His music was commissioned by institutions including the American Guild of Organists, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the San Francisco Symphony, and many churches; his works are published by Theodore Presser, C. F. Peters, and Oxford University Press.

Composed in 1980, Dismas Variations is a compact but formidable work for solo organ, published by Theodore Presser. Its title refers to St. Dismas, traditionally identified as the “good thief” crucified beside Christ, whose plea for remembrance becomes, in Christian imagination, one of the Passion’s most concentrated images of repentance, mercy, and transfiguration.

The piece is described by its publisher as “a dramatic work that moves like a violent storm with intervals of placid calm and resolves into clear sunlight.” It is a serialized work based on a four-note set derived from the all-interval tetrachord and lasts approximately thirteen minutes. Rather than presenting variation form as decorative elaboration, Robinson treats it as a spiritual and dramatic process. The music’s sharply etched gestures, turbulent accumulations, and moments of suspended repose suggest an inward Passion narrative: conflict, petition, stillness, and release.

McNeil Robinson’s Hommage à Messiaen is both tribute and transformation: a compact organ work that acknowledges a distinctive musical voice of the twentieth century while speaking unmistakably in Robinson’s own idiom. Robinson’s music often reflects the instincts of a master improviser: clarity of gesture and a sure sense of architectural proportion.

The dedicatee of this homage, Olivier Messiaen, reshaped the language of organ music through his ecstatic harmonies, rhythmic asymmetries, modes of limited transposition, and lifelong fascination with birdsong and color. As organist of La Trinité in Paris for more than sixty years, Messiaen made the instrument a vehicle for theology and mystery; his sound-world remains instantly recognizable in its combination of brilliance, stillness, and spiritual intensity.

transcribed for organ by Justin Bischof

Wagner’s Parsifal, completed near the end of his life, occupies a singular place in nineteenth-century music: part opera, part ritual, part meditation on compassion, suffering, and redemption. The March to the Holy Grail, heard in Act I as the Knights of the Grail assemble, is a solemn ceremonial moment. Its tread is processional, but not merely grand; it moves with the weight of mystery, devotion, and spiritual expectancy.

Franz Liszt, Wagner’s friend, champion, and father-in-law, made his piano transcription of the Feierlicher Marsch zum heiligen Gral aus “Parsifal” in 1882, the year of Parsifal’s Bayreuth premiere. It was published by Schott in 1883 as Liszt’s S.450, and it stands among his final Wagner transcriptions. Unlike a simple reduction, Liszt’s version reimagines Wagner’s orchestral sonority through the piano, preserving the march’s ritual gravity while transforming its colors into the language of the keyboard. One contemporary description notes the importance of the ostinato bass and Grail theme, along with Liszt’s evocation of Wagner’s bell sonorities through pedal effects.

For this recording, I have made a further transcription of Liszt’s transcription of Wagner’s work, bringing the piece to the organ. In doing so, the music returns, in a sense, to an instrument uniquely suited to its sacred and ceremonial character. The organ’s capacity for sustained tone and layered registration allows Wagner’s processional lines and Liszt’s pianistic textures to unfold with a different kind of resonance. Rather than attempting to imitate the orchestra or the piano, this version seeks to let the organ speak in its own voice: noble and monumental.

Few musical signatures have exerted as powerful a fascination as the four-note motto B-A-C-H. In German notation, these letters spell the pitches B-flat, A, C, and B-natural, allowing Johann Sebastian Bach’s name to become a musical subject in itself. Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H transforms that compact chromatic idea into a work of extraordinary scale and spiritual force.

Although its title invokes fugue and Bach, Liszt’s language is unmistakably Romantic. The B-A-C-H motto appears not as an academic exercise but as a charged musical emblem: declaimed in the pedals, hammered in massive chords, fragmented in restless passagework, and expanded into waves of virtuoso sonority. The opening fantasy is improvisatory and dramatic, moving through abrupt contrasts of texture, harmony, and registration. The music seems to search, struggle, and proclaim, with the four-note theme constantly reappearing in altered guises.

The fugue that follows does not retreat into strict Baroque imitation. Instead, Liszt fuses contrapuntal discipline with orchestral grandeur. The subject grows from the B-A-C-H motif, but the music soon accumulates the sweeping momentum, harmonic daring, and theatrical intensity typical of Liszt’s mature style. What begins as homage becomes transformation: Bach’s name is refracted through the sound world of the nineteenth-century organ.

In this work, Liszt pays tribute not by imitation but by elevation. The Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H stands as both memorial and monument: a Romantic vision of Bach as spiritual ancestor and inexhaustible musical symbol.

Johannes Klais Orgelbau GmbH & Co., Bonn, Germany, Op. 1,951, 2017
Church of St. James the Less, Scarsdale, New York
IV/65, electric action, 61-note manuals, 32-note pedal, mostly slider manual windchests, all-electric Pedal windchests

I. Positive C-c⁴
8 Principal
8 Flûte à cheminée
8 Salicional
4 Prestant
4 Flûte à bec
2-2/3 Nasard 
2 Doublette
1-3/5 Tierce
III Plein jeu 1
8 Clarinette
Tremolo
8 Festival Trumpet (Ant)
Sw to Pos
Ant Gt to Pos
Ant Sw to Pos

II. Great C-c⁴
16 Principal
8 Diapason
8 Principal (ext)
8 Flûte harmonique
8 Gedackt
4 Principal (ext)
4 Octave
4 Nachthorn
2-2/3 Quinte
2 Superoctave
IV Mixtur 1-1/3
16 Trompete
8 Trompete
8 Festival Trumpet (Ant)
Pos 16, 8, 4
Pos to Gr
Sw to Gr
Ant Gt to Gt
Ant Sw to Gt

III. Swell C-c⁴
16 Bourdon
8 Diapason
8 Bourdon
8 Gambe
8 Voix céleste
4 Flûte octaviante
2 Octavin
IV Mixture 2-2/3
16 Basson
8 Trompette
harmonique
8 Hautbois
4 Clairon
Tremolo
8 Festival Trumpet (Ant)
Sw 16, 8, 4
Ant Sw to Sw

IV. Antiphonal Great C-c⁴
16 Bourdon
8 Open Diapason
4 Octave
4 Flute
2 Fifteenth
Ant Gt 16, 8, 4

IV. Antiphonal Swell C-c⁴
8 Open Flute
8 Stopped Diapason
4 Octave
8 Oboe
Tremolo
8 Festival Trumpet
Ant Sw 16, 8, 4

Pedal 32 notes, C-g¹
32 Bourdon
16 Contrabass
16 Principal (Gt)
16 Subbass
16 Bourdon (Sw)
8 Octavbass
8 Bassflöte
8 Salicional (Pos)
8 Bourdon (Sw)
4 Superoctave
37 (32' Resultant*)
16 Posaune
8 Trompete
8 Festival Trumpet (Ant)
Pos to Ped
Gr to Ped
Sw to Ped 8, 4
Ant Gt to Ped
Ant Sw to Ped

* 32’ Resultant of pitches drawn from the 16’ Principal: 16, 10-2/3, 
6-2/5, 4-4/7. The sum of the pitches is 37-67/105.

Justin Bischof
Justin Bischof has been lauded by The New York Times as “impressive… spontaneous… subtle…” and is internationally recognized as an orchestral and opera conductor, concert and liturgical organist, pianist, improviser, composer, and educator. He has appeared at many of the world’s leading venues, including Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Rose Theater, Tonhalle Zürich, the Royal Opera House Muscat, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and Cologne Cathedral. His collaborators have included Joshua Bell, Philippe Entremont, Bright Sheng, Tan Dun, and Roberta Peters.

As a conductor, Bischof has led orchestras throughout the world, including the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra, State Philharmonic Kavkazskiye in Russia, the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts Orchestra, and the National Orchestra of Haiti. His operatic work includes his Australian conducting debut at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in the Australian premiere of The Crucible, a critically acclaimed production. Additional opera projects include the Hawaiian premieres of The Medium and The Telephone, productions of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, and Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia in New York. He has also led innovative crossover projects such as Opera Trash, presented at venues including Carnegie Hall and Le Poisson Rouge.
Bischof is Founder and Artistic Director of MOO — Modus Operandi Orchestra — in New York City, an ensemble of 65 leading freelance musicians dedicated to presenting symphonic, operatic, and choral repertoire at the highest level while engaging and enriching the community.

Notable MOO projects include the first performance outside Cuba of Guido Gavilán’s Afro-Cuban Antilles Violin Concerto with Ilmar Gavilán. MOO also served as guest orchestra for the two bicentennial concerts of historic Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, under Bischof’s direction. These programs included Rach­mani­noff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with Jeremy Filsell, Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, and Poulenc’s Stabat Mater. A highlight was Bischof and MOO accompanying the Saint Thomas Choir of Men and Boys in the newly orchestrated O God, my heart is ready by Ned Rorem.

MOO has presented five concerts to date at Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center, including the first New York performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto since its 1912 New York premiere, with Chloé Kiffer as soloist. Other programs have included works by Brahms, including Symphony No. 4; Mozart, including Symphonies Nos. 40 and 41; and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 with pianist Alexandre Moutouzkine.

A strong advocate for music’s transformative power in the humanitarian sphere, Bischof co-founded with Dorothy E. Yewer a decade-long annual children’s benefit series in Scarsdale that raised more than a million dollars and enabled more than 800 at-risk children to attend summer camp. The final concerts, held at SUNY Purchase, culminated in a 10th Anniversary Gala performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, featuring soloists from the Metropolitan Opera and massed children’s choirs. Internationally, he has led three outreach residencies in Haiti with the Orchestre Philharmonique Sainte Trinité and Les Petits Chanteurs, collaborating with musicians ranging in age from 12 to 50 in Port-au-Prince.

Described as “a master virtuoso” by the Frankfurter Neue Presse and “virtuosic” by the Los Angeles Times, Bischof is also among the profession’s leading concert organists. A First Prize winner of the American Guild of Organists International Organ Improvisation Competition, he is widely recognized for his improvisational performances. He has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the Zurich Symphony, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Milwaukee Symphony. A regular guest organist at the Royal Opera House Muscat, he has presented Middle East premieres of major works for organ and orchestra by Samuel Barber, Malcolm Arnold, and Percy Whitlock, including Barber’s Toccata Festiva, Arnold’s Organ Concerto, and Whitlock’s Poem.

Bischof has held significant liturgical leadership positions throughout New York, including Associate Director of Music at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue, Director of Music at the Church of the Resurrection on Park Avenue, and Director of Music and Organist at the Church of St. James the Less in Scarsdale, where he served for a decade and oversaw the installation of the major Klais pipe organ heard on this recording. He also served for 15 years as Music Director of Westchester Reform Temple and currently serves as Music Director of Larchmont Temple. He is currently Director of Music and Organist at Christ Church, Pelham Manor, New York.
An active composer, Bischof receives regular commissions. His recent work Romp for Pedals & Orchestra was premiered at an American Guild of Organists convention in 2023, marking the emergence of a new genre. In May 2026, the solo version of Romp was premiered by organist Stephen Tharp at Riverside Church in New York City. His choral works have been commissioned and performed by numerous institutions, including Park Avenue Synagogue.

A dedicated mentor and arts educator, Bischof coaches conductors, instrumentalists, and arts leaders in performance, interpretation, and fundraising. He serves as Chair of the Alumni Association of the Manhattan School of Music and just completed his five-year term as Board Chair of the Conductors Retreat at Medomak. He was elected to the board of the Lotos Foundation (The Lotos Club) in 2026 to serve a three-year term. He has held faculty positions at the Manhattan School of Music, Westminster Choir College, and Barnard College and is in demand internationally as a clinician, lecturer, and teacher.

My Time at St. James the Less
I am intensely proud of my decade of service as Director of Music and Organist at the Church of St. James the Less from 2007 to 2017. I led a renewal of the parish’s music program, elevating it to a position of artistic distinction in the region and the country. The adult choir became a disciplined and expressive ensemble of high caliber, while the three new graded youth choirs established a vibrant and enduring foundation for musical formation.

In partnership with Benefit Chair Dorothy E. Yewer, we inaugurated an annual series of concerts for choir and orchestra that became a defining element of the parish’s cultural life. These performances raised more than one million dollars to send eight hundred at-risk youths from the Edward Williams School in Mount Vernon to the Children’s Aid Society’s Wagon Road Camp in Chappaqua, NY. This significant work was made possible through Dorothy’s tireless leadership and the generosity of a devoted community of supporters.

The parish’s hope for a new organ had remained unrealized for decades, but by securing major early gifts toward the $1.8 million campaign, the project was initiated that would become the Klais organ from Bonn, Germany – an instrument of international standing. I am deeply grateful for the vision and generosity of the project’s principal donor families: Anon, Bohringer, Brooks, Cacciato, Capozzo/Riddell, Davies, Dugan, Hallowell, Han, Hansen, Herman, Ionescu, Johnson, Kenney, Kindred, Loftus, Marcus, Martin, McCarthy, Mills/Finlan, Panthen, Pirri, Reuter, Savarese, Schmitter, Segar, Smith, West, Whitney, Wolfe and Yewer. I am equally grateful to every donor, at every level, who made this historic project a reality.

As a concert organist, conductor, composer, and educator, my work is grounded in a commitment to artistic excellence, interpretive depth, and purposeful leadership. It remains a singular privilege to have shaped the musical life of St. James the Less during a decade marked by growth, ambition, and the monumental instrument you hear on this album.

About McNeil
McNeil was my teacher and mentor, but those words only begin to describe what he meant to me. He believed in me deeply — as an organist, as a performer, an improviser, and an artist with something real to say. His confidence in me was one of the great gifts of my life. He saw possibilities in me before I saw them in myself, and he encouraged me with a generosity and affection that I will never forget.

Our relationship grew far beyond lessons, music, and professional guidance. McNeil and Christina welcomed me into their home and into their lives. Over the years, we shared countless evenings making wonderful dinners together. Those meals remain among my happiest memories: the warmth of their kitchen, the ease of friendship, and the joy of creating something beautiful together around a table. McNeil brought to friendship the same qualities he brought to music — imagination, wit, intensity, refinement, and enormous heart.

He loved me, respected me, challenged me, and trusted me. That trust meant everything. In his presence, I felt not only taught, but known. He understood the connection between discipline and freedom, between craft and inspiration, and he gave me permission to bring my whole self to the instrument — especially in improvisation, where his influence remains a living presence in my work.

The Dismas Variations carry, for me, the sound of McNeil’s mind and spirit: searching, compassionate, dramatic, and full of faith in transformation. To play this piece now is to return to him — to his brilliant voice and his unwavering belief in me. Including McNeil Robinson’s Dismas Variations on this recording is, for me, an act of love and gratitude in remembrance.

This performance is offered in loving memory of McNeil Robinson, with gratitude beyond words. It is the first digital recording of this work.
Justin Bischof

The Church and Its Organs
The Episcopal Parish of St. James the Less was founded in 1849 and construction of the building began in 1850. The completed church was consecrated in 1851. New York City organbuilder William H. Davis (1816-1888) built a pipe organ for it in 1866.* 

If an instrument was used before 1866, no record of it has been found. If there was an instrument, it was probably a reed organ: with reed organ technnology advancing in the USA by the late 1840s and into the 1850s, they were relatively inexpensive, small, and easy to move.

After fire destroyed most of the edifice in 1882, it was rebuilt in essentially the same style with a new pipe organ supplied in 1883 by Hook & Hastings of Boston, op. 1191, of one manual and 13 registers.

The transepts and chancel were added to the building in 1925 when a 15-rank organ by Hillgreen, Lane & Co. of Alliance, Ohio, op. 832 of two manuals and pedal, replaced the Hook & Hastings.

The Hillgreen, Lane organ was replaced by Aeolian-­Skinner op. 1053 of three manuals, pedal, and 44 ranks, dedicated in 1946. Played the last time for a worship service in Scarsdale on Easter Sunday, 2016, the Aeolian-­Skinner was relocated to Mount Calvary Lutheran Church, San Antonio, Texas, where it was dedicated on June 3, 2018.

The new Klais organ was dedicated at St. James the Less in Scarsdale on November 4, 2017, in a recital played by Justin Bischof.
______
*Theodore Davis: William H. Davis & Son List of Organs, The Tracker, Vol. 44, No. 4, 2000 (Richmond, VA: The Organ Historical Society, 2000), 31.
A brief history of the church to 1886 appears in James Grant Wilson [editor], The Centennial History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of New York / 1785-1885 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1886), 308, reseached and cited courtesy Stephen Pinel.