Context Compositions For Pipe Organ Show How Bach Learned From His Older Contemporaries

Northwest Bach Festival Sunday, Feb. 13, St. John’s Cathedral

Bach wrote some 250 works for organ - eight thick volumes in the edition I have.

James David Christie played only two of them Sunday afternoon at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral. But Christie’s choice left no doubt why listeners think of Bach when they think of the pipe organ.

Bach was included along with organ music by two older German contemporaries, Georg Boehm and Dietrich Buxtehude, whose work Christie used to show the context in which Bach’s music was written.

The recital opened with Buxtehude’s “Magnificat primi toni,” a work that evolves through a series of short sections, some of which sound improvisatory, others stricter in style.

Christie rose easily to the challenge of building the work’s patchwork construction into a unified edifice. And he seemed to have great fun with its concluding fugue in jig rhythm (or “gigue” as Bach and European contemporaries would have known this snappy Irish dance).

The Buxtehude works later on the program included another, longer (but fully as delightful) “Jig” Fugue and a very serious Chaconne in C minor. I was especially taken with the chorale prelude “Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist” - “every young organist’s introduction to Buxtehude,” Christie says. Even a fairly simple piece as this showed Buxtehude’s skill and imagination in the hands of a skillful and imaginative performer.

Christie showed Buxtehude as the master at making fugual layer cakes out of a single melody. But Georg Boehm, an organist Bach knew as a boy, was a kind of interior decorator of melodies.

Under Christie’s fingers, Boehm’s 12 variations on the chorale “Freu dich sehr, o mine Seele” showed a fresh French breeze blowing through the somber German style.

Boehm’s Prelude in D minor ended with yet another jig-dancing fugue; the rhythm must have been musically contagious.

Christie’s Bach showed how the composer used his masterful knowledge of great older contemporaries like Buxtehude and Boehm.

Bach’s Fugue on the “Magnificat” and the monumental Prelude and Fugue in E-flat (“St. Anne”) show organ composition reaching previously unscaled heights. Christie was an ideal guide to the interplay of Bach’s layers of melodies and his profound elaboration of them.

The organ at St. John’s is not my favorite Spokane instrument for the complex textures of baroque music. It is scheduled for a much-needed renovation this summer.

But Christie’s selection of stops from the organ’s palette - some clear and alluring flute stops, some assertive reeds and trumpets - made the cathedral’s organ work very well for his “Fabulous Three B’s of the Baroque.”