Organist Christie Revels In Bach’s Music

Northwest Bach Festival Sunday, Our Lady of Lourdes Cathedral

Bach was considered the greatest organist of his time. Organist James David Christie showed why in a dazzling concert to a capacity audience at Our Lady of Lourdes Cathedral on Sunday afternoon, playing music of the young J.S. Bach and his older contemporaries.

Christie, who has served as organist of the Boston Symphony for nearly 20 years, is organist at several Boston area colleges. Hearing him revel in the physical and coloristic aspects of Bach’s music makes it understandable why Bach Festival artistic director Gunther Schuller invited him to Spokane.

Bach learned from such older organists as Johann Adam Reincken and Dietrich Buxtehude as well as family members like Johann Bernhard Bach. Christie opened Sunday’s program with Buxtehude’s Praeludium in D minor, showing not only what a great organist Buxtehude must have been, but how the young Bach learned to develop little melodic ideas into large forms from his older colleague.

The music of Bach’s own family was represented by his cousin Johann Bernhard’s Ciacona, a set of variations that bore more than passing resemblance to Pachelbel’s famous Canon.

Johann Adam Reincken was well into his 80s when Bach met him, but Reincken already detected the improvisational skill in Bach that Reincken himself had been famous for in his young days. Christie made a charming case for Reincken’s chattering little Fugue in G minor, a work that gave only a hint or two of Reincken the rip-roaring virtuoso.

The remainder of Sunday’s program was devoted to works by Bach himself, the Praeludium in G with its formidably difficult pedal part, several chorale preludes and the grand conclusion with the Toccata in D minor.

Christie included two chorale preludes from the most recently discovered set of Bach pieces, the Neumeister Organ Book found not in the musty cellar of a Saxon church or in some dark palace library in Berlin but in the well-lighted stacks of the Yale Library.

These pieces were the work of Bach as a teenager and demonstrated that he was as imaginative as he was capable.

Nothing else Christie played was as touching, though, as his playing of “Erbarm dich min, o Herre Gott,” whose hymn melody soars out over a sea of throbbing chords.

Christie’s improvisatory handling of that old organistic thriller, the Toccata (and Fugue) in D minor was filled with all the power and color one could ask for.

, DataTimes MEMO: The next concert in the Bach Festival will be Wednesday at The Met at 8 p.m.