NobleSpirit Featured Consignor: Lois Regestein
Our July catalogue sale features a coin collection of Rare Date Gold and American Silver Eagles from renown organist, Lois Regestein.
The sale will run July 15th, 2022 – July 30th, 2022
Lois Regestein has been playing the organ for what seems like centuries. She began organ studies at age 12 and played for church services on a transplanted Wurlitzer theater organ at age 13. Hence, she thought that organs included snare drums and cymbals. She played her first solo recital at age 15.
She graduated from Oberlin College and Yale School of Music with a degree in music and organ studies. Thereafter, she served as National Councilor of the Organ Historical Society for four 2-year terms and played concerts at more than 20 OHS national conventions. She served a 2-year term as Dean of the Boston Chapter of the American Guild of Organists – then by far the country’s largest Chapter – and gave concerts at regional and national AGO conventions. She served one term as Executive Director of the Old West Organ Society, often concertizing on the internationally celebrated 1972 Fisk organ there.
Her European concert tours included arduous tours in former East Germany. Lois then arranged concert tours throughout the United States for East German musicians. She has also concertized in West Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Portugal, including the dedicatory first organ concert on a Berlin record producer’s house organ.
She has performed on the unusually large organs at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, the Medina Temple in Chicago, and Methuen Memorial Music Hall in Massachusetts. At the latter two locations, she performed a “storm piece,” a popular genre during the 19th century that incorporated klieg lights flashing from inside the organ in the darkened hall.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York asked Lois to play a program of music from circa 1800, the time of American polymath Charles Wilson Peale and his sons, in conjunction with an exhibit of their paintings. Inspired by the museum’s newly acquired Thomas Appleton organ, she recorded pieces on all seven of the existing Appleton organs in the U.S., scattered from Maine to South Carolina (Raven Records). She has rededicated newly installed 19th century organs at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Yarmouth, ME and Alfred Town Church in Alfred, ME.
Lois has served as organist at First Church in Winchester, MA for 22 years, and the Congregational Church in Auburndale for 10 years, where she arranged installation of an E. and G. G. Hook Organ. She is currently preparing to concertize for the 50th anniversary of that installation. She was also organist at Immaculate Conception Church and St. Thomas Aquinas
Church in Boston, and St. Lawrence Church in Brookline.
Her efforts to preserve the organ at Immaculate Conception earned her the Distinguished Service Award of the OHS. She favors mechanical-action organs, particularly those built by E. and G. G. Hook in the 19th century. She lives in Boston, where she is involved in historic preservation. Coins have been a pleasant diversion.