Cameron Carpenter

The androgynous image and flashy costumes are not surprising on the rock scene, they are less common in classical music. The American organist Cameron Carpenter clearly breaks down the established ideas. His extravagance goes hand in hand with unquestionable virtuosity, The New Yorker recently wrote about Carpenter and even called him a "superstar". The musician himself insists that openness belongs to music for the contemporary audience - by this he means that organists cannot shut themselves up in churches.

He has so far managed to maintain a balance between the so-called modern and classical worlds. This is also evidenced by the fact that he is the first organist to receive a nomination for a Grammy Award, his album If You Could Read My Mind was also awarded by the ECHO Klassik jury in the Instrumentalist of the Year category at the end of the summer.

Cameron Carpenter is one of the prodigies. He started playing at the age of four, and at eleven he was already interpreting Bach's Well-tempered Piano. In high school, he arranged more than a hundred major works for the organ, including Mahler's Fifth Symphony, and began writing his own compositions. He recorded his first album Notes From Underground in 2005, followed a year later by the recording of Mussorgsky's Pictures from the exhibition.

Although he has a reputation in the world of classical music as an extravagant artist and a controversial person, he cannot be denied a portion of genius. He completed the reputation of a non-conformist artist when he had a unique digital organ built to his own design in America, a futuristic instrument worth 1.2 million dollars.