Organist Lynn Trapp learned to play the piano on a large upright piano on his family’s farm near St. Louis, Missouri.
He still remembers his dad turning on The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square’s “Music & the Spoken Word” and listening to the choir and organists.
“I can hear that staticky radio like it was yesterday,” said Trapp, who is the director of liturgy and music at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Baltimore, Maryland.
Trapp will be the featured performer at the next Tabernacle Organ Virtuoso Performance Series concert on Friday, Sept. 12, at 7:30 p.m. MDT in the Salt Lake Tabernacle in downtown Salt Lake City. Admission is free and open to the public, and tickets are not required, according to the Tabernacle Choir’s announcement. While past concerts have been livestreamed and available for on-demand viewing, this will be available only as an in-person performance.
See “Parking for Assembly Hall and Tabernacle Events” on ChurchofJesusChrist.org for information about parking and public transit options.
The Tabernacle Organ Virtuoso Performance Series started in 2022 and was created to showcase the Tabernacle organ — with its five manuals, or keyboards, and 206 ranks of organ pipes — and world-renowned organists and has been presented quarterly. This concert with Trapp is the 13th in the series and second of 2025.
“The presence and ministry of the Tabernacle [Choir and organ] is worldwide and has been a part of my heart forever,” said Trapp.
Trapp began playing the piano growing up in Missouri — his dad was his first teacher. Their Catholic parish got a new priest who was Hungarian and had been in the Vienna Boys’ Choir. The new priest began to teach him, Trapp said. In about the eighth grade, Trapp began taking organ lessons at the local university.
With the lessons came opportunities for contests, and he won a national organ competition. He was able to go to Europe and compete, too.
“It was the encouragement of the great teachers that God put along my journey,” Trapp said of his success as an organist.
He’s performed in various settings, including universities and churches, and has played the organ at St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey in London, England, and at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France. Trapp is co-founder of the American Pilgrimage Choir, leading performance tours across Europe and the Holy Land.
For Trapp, music and faith are intertwined, as that’s where his musical education began. “It’s the burning heart,” he said. And it’s not simply the music, as the lyrics with sacred texts are part of the worship.
He added, “I’m not able to play anything without faith being ignited inside me.”
Being the director of liturgy and music at St. Joseph Catholic Church, where he has served since 2015, he’s the choirmaster, organist and pianist, and he leads a professional scholar singer program and concert series. Prior to serving at St. Joseph, he was at St. Olaf Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for 20 years.
Trapp, through his experiences, sees how “music is integral to worship.” Music can bring in spiritual connections between the doctrine and teachings, and the worshipper.
However, in any worship service, there will be practically as many opinions about the music as there are people, from feeling it’s too demure to those who feel it was inspired.
“My job is to inspire the sacred moments,” Trapp said of music in worship services.
Previous Virtuoso Organ Performance Series concerts
The series began in 2022 with concerts by James Higdon, an organist from the University of Kansas; Gabriele Terrone, the Cathedral of the Madeleine’s organist and assistant director of music, in Salt Lake City; and Andrew Unsworth, who has been a Tabernacle organist since 2007.
In 2023, performers were Viktor Billa, Ukrainian organist and soloist who is an organist at Trinity United Methodist Church in Tallahassee, Florida; James O’Donnell, professor of the practice of organ at Yale School of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music in New Haven, Connecticut, who has had tenures at the Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral, both in London, England; Daniel Kerr, the chair of the Music Department at Brigham Young University–Idaho; and Brian Mathias, who has been a Tabernacle organist since 2018.
The first concert of 2024 featured Temple Square organist Linda Margetts in February. Organist Diane Meredith Belcher, who has been performing for 50 years, was featured in May. Seth Bott, who is a native of Castle Dale, Utah, and director of music and organist at St. James Episcopal Church in Midvale, Utah, performed in September. Victoria Shorokhova, who is pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in organ performance at University of Houston in Texas and is the organ scholar at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Houston, Texas, performed in November.
Earlier this year, James Welch, who has taught at University of California, Santa Barbara, and at Santa Clara University and performed in concerts and recitals around the world, was the featured performer. The spring 2025 performance wasn’t presented because of work on the Tabernacle organ.
The concerts with Welch, Shorokhova, Bott and Mathias are available on the choir’s YouTube channel.
Playlists of organ music, including “Organ Solos” and “Tabernacle Choir Organ Performances” are available on the Tabernacle Choir’s YouTube channel.
