And then she laughs with typical abandon and mentions the procession of animals--real animals, elephants and horses and monkeys, parading down the aisle--for the ceremony honoring St. Francis; the visiting artists playing African drums and Indian flutes; the showing on Halloween of Lon Chaney’s silent-screen classic The Phantom of the Opera to organ accompaniment; and her own improvisations on the vintage-1910 Aeolian-Skinner, including her welcome to the Cathedral’s new dean named Harry, from Georgia, with a rendition of Georgia On My Mind and I’m Just Wild About Harry.

“It’s irreverent in a holistic and adventurous way,” says the ebullient 40-year-old, who in 1989 became the first woman in the Cathedral’s history to fill the post. “It’s all in how you look at it. It’s fun, you know? I’ve tried to get organs to be hip and fun and relevant again. That seems to be what my niche is in the organ world in America.”

Which extends not just to her cathedral improvisations, but her four CDs (released on the Pro Organo label), including her first, Dorothy Over The Rainbow, which featured an original composition dedicated to naval friend Paul called, “O Pavlos Stin Thalassa,” on percussion, violin and organ.

“The organ got very uptight and very stuffed-shirt and it got really anal,” she explains, at least until she came along. “But it’s so much fun, it’s so much fun!”

And she spreads her joy everywhere besides the Cathedral: she plays regularly with Dino Anagnost and The Little Orchestra (they hope someday to do a concert together at the Megaron in Greece); she’s done Buddhist funerals and Jewish weddings (her second CD, I Do, Me Too, was a collection of interfaith wedding music); and right now she’s composing a musical.

She credits her “big Greek feet” with giving her the span to hit thirds on the foot pedals with one foot (she’s six feet tall), but otherwise says size doesn’t really matter in making a great organist. “It takes a while to learn how to do it,” she says, “but it’s so much fun.”

The fun for her began in Reno, Nevada, where she began learning jazz piano at nine, then came to live with her father Peter in New York (she was baptized Greek Orthodox and re-baptized Episcopalian after her parents’ divorce: “I’m a double-dip,” she laughs). After studies at Barnard, a friend told her St. John’s was looking for an organist, and she got the job doing a concert series for kids. Then she heard Paul Halley, the Cathedral’s senior organist and a world-class improviser, and she wrote him a letter begging for a chance to study with him.

“And he said, ‘Come on up; I don’t really teach students improvisation, but I’d love to hear what you’re doing,’” she remembers. She did, he loved it (“Yep, yep,” he said, “I’ll work with you”), and she studied with him for almost three years before he took a sabbatical that became permanent, and she was offered the job at 28.

When she’s not performing, she travels the world (she circled the globe along the equator and studied indigenous music along the way), and often visits Greece to see her aunt Rica Diallina, the actress, who was a house in Porto Hydra, her cousin Demetra in Eraklion, or her other cousin, Louis Manikas, an opera singer based in Stuttgart.

PROFILE
Her jazz piano teacher in Nevada was a former cabaret player named Loren McNabb: “And after each of my piano lessons, I’d say, ‘Oh, Mr. McNabb, please, would you play me something by Duke Ellington or Cole Porter?” The jazz dazzled her more than Mozart and Bach, and then, when McNabb died, she found a second mentor in the organist at church, who switched her back to Bach again.

CREDO
“It’s getting people turned on to the instrument again. It’s also about people realizing that the organ has enormous potential.”

She calls her vintage Aeolian-Skinner organ, “the Rolls Royce of American pipe organs.”

“What I love about playing here is that the Cathedral really nurtures my creativity: I can do pretty much anything I want and they trust me to have good taste. I mean, sometimes, I’ve played New York, New York on a Sunday morning, or Summertime.”

“The tragedy is that I never got to learn Greek. You know how most Greek kids get to Greek school?…So, I don’t really speak the language fluently at all.”

Her father Peter was a Spartan immigrant who became a helicopter designer: “Dad was a real pioneer. He perfected the technology to make the first coaxial helicopter fly, with two sets of blades, and he did it remote-controlled, which no one had ever done before. It was really technology ahead of its time.”

She says her father was also a pioneer because, despite being a protective Greek father, he let her grow up her way: “We sure locked horns. But in the end, I was very much like him and he was very supportive of me going out to find my dreams.”

DEMETRIOS RHOMPOTIS
dondemetrio@neomagazine.com