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Review: Peter Sykes draws the stops; Bach and the Roosevelt Organ draw the audience

Larry Chernicoff

Organist Peter Sykes speaking to the audience from the Great Barrington Congregational Church's 1883 Roosevelt Organ. Photo by David Edwards.

Organ recital by Peter Sykes, presented by the Berkshire Bach SocietyProgram of D. Buxtehude, J. S. Bach, and Félix MendelssohnSaturday, April 13, 4 p.m., at the Congregational Church, Great Barrington, Massachusetts


The Berkshire Bach Society has once again demonstrated the attractiveness of organ recitals in the Berkshires. Organ concerts used to attract only small audiences, owing to the relative invisibility of the performer and to the reputation of the organ as purely a church instrument. But much great organ music is not intended for services and can only be heard at recitals such as this. Following the success of Renée-Anne Louprette’s Februrary outing with the Johnson organ in Housatonic, Peter Sykes returned last Saturday to prove to a full house that, despite its grandiose size and massive power, the 1883 Roosevelt Organ in the Congregational Church in Great Barrington can “play anything,” including 350-year-old music crafted for instruments of radically different design.


It should be added that not just anyone can “play anything” on this instrument; it takes real wizardry to tame the beast, which has over 70 ranks (like 70 different instruments!) connected to four keyboards and a pedal board, with over 5,000 pipes. A large part of the performer’s art is making the appropriate selection and combination of sound possibilities to bring the music to life with color, transparency, variety, and personality; on the other hand, to coax the organ to sound like a musical instrument rather than the machine which it actually is. That Sykes knows how to employ this particular instrument for his musical purposes and bring out its best qualities was amply demonstrated by the performance as well as by a video documentary shown prior to the concert in which he takes the viewer/listener on a tour of all its many facets, pulling each stop separately and then mixing the colors, demonstrating subtleties of shading, brightness, and volume that are almost undetectable, but which the skilled tone-painter knows how to tease out of the instrument for a “speaking” performance. For any organist, physical dexterity in the continuous use of both hands and feet is a basic requirement. The performer needs to be active on the keyboards and pedal board while also managing the changes in registration.


An additional facet of Sykes’ artistry is his skill in building a program that sustains interest and expands the audience’s horizons. One way that was done on Saturday’s program was to perform compositions in groups. The opening work was actually a series of short compositions structured together as a group in itself. This was the “Magnificat primi toni” by Dietrich Buxtehude, consisting of a series of short sections loosely associated with the Latin verses of the “Magnificat,” otherwise known as the “Canticle of the Blessed Virgin Mary.” In vocal settings (such as Bach’s), each verse may be a separate song or chorus voicing Mary’s response to the angel Gabriel’s annunciation. Buxtehude’s instrumental work reflects that structure without strictly following the text; the result is a delightful series of seven gems connected by variation and contrast. Sykes effectively differentiated them through color and pacing. Buxtehude’s musical language has one foot in the older modal system and the other in the newer tonal realm, which gives these miniatures a delightful freedom and spontaneity.


“The Annunciation,” by Fra Angelico.

The Bach group at the center of the program consisted of six settings of the Lutheran hymn “Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehre.” Sykes explained that this was Bach’s most frequently set chorale, the German hymn version of the Latin “Gloria,” which was used in services each week of the church year. While so many settings of the same tune might look like too much of a good thing on paper, the wide variety of strategies, moods, textures, and personalities of these compositions facilitated appreciation for the differences rather than the similarities; but careful presentation and attentive listening revealed the shared melody. This would have been easier for Bach’s own parishioners, owing to their familiarity with the tune, but the order of presentation on this program helped the modern (non-Lutheran?) listener follow the melodic thread.


The first of these settings had the simplest texture, a perky melody bouncing along in the bass that introduced and accompanied each unadorned statement of the successive hymn phrases. The final work of the set was a classic four-part harmonization with improv-style (but fully written out) connections between phrases. Sykes assured the audience that they would know where to applaud since this final work in the set would also be the loudest; he clearly relished the opportunity to display the “lungs” of the Roosevelt the way Bach would when, testing new organs (which was one of his side businesses), he would pull out all the stops. In between the friendly, good nature of the first and the ceremonial pomp of the last, there were four settings that displayed Bach’s apparently limitless inventiveness in expanding, multiplying, disguising, and showing new facets of the basic melody. The composer was proud enough of the three most elaborate settings to include them in a collection of 18 of his greatest organ chorales that he collected and published in Leipzig during his final decade. This was part of his late-life project of perpetuating in print what he thought of as his most significant accomplishments. (Relatively few of Bach’s compositions were printed during his lifetime.) They stand with other works representing the summation of his art, such as the “Goldberg Variations,” the “Art of the Fugue,” the “Musical Offering,” and the “B Minor Mass.” While these chorales are less well known, thanks to the revelations offered by performers like Sykes and to newly enthusiastic audiences, they are beginning to receive appropriate recognition. (Peter Sykes’ complete recording of this collection is available on the Raven label.)


The final “set” was assembled by Sykes to conclude the concert in spectacular fashion: a prelude and fugue by Mendelssohn and a fantasy and fugue by Bach. In the Louprette program (see my review here), Mendelssohn’s gentle Victorian organ sonata was overshadowed by monumental companion works by Bach and Franck. Here Mendelssohn’s neo-Baroque exercise stood up well with one of Bach’s most powerful structures. In the 19th century, Mendelssohn was the single most important figure to spread the word about Bach, who was known mostly to the musical “in” crowd. His adoration of the older master included composing new works that aspired to a high level of contrapuntal rigor and consistent compositional logic, primarily in his preludes and fugues. His best known such work is a fugue in E minor for piano that he composed at age 20. Ten years later, he incorporated it into a set of a half-dozen preludes and fugue (published as op. 35) and followed that up with three more for organ (op. 37), the second of which was performed by Sykes. The prelude is more Mendelssohn than Bach, a gently lilting pastorale that seems more closely related to the music of the shepherds in Handel’s Messiah rather than to Bach’s “Sheep may safely graze.” But Mendelssohn’s companion fugue speaks the language of Bach’s counterpoint, using structures and materials with which Bach was familiar; there are only a few harmonies that reveal the composer’s “gentle” nature, and the fugal structure unfolds with economy, logic, and inevitability. That said, the fugue subject doesn’t have quite the trenchant profile that Bach seemed to be able to come up with at will for his fugue subjects, and the overall impression is just a bit bland. (There can only be one Bach.) This was compensated for by Sykes’ resourceful registration, which built sonority and grandeur continuously to a strong conclusion.


Its companion piece, Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, is one of those works that almost seems to emanate from nature itself, as if carved out of a block of granite. The Fantasia developed contrapuntally from its thematic materials with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. The connected fugue continued the inexorable forward motion, and at the point when it appeared to be complete, Bach added to the conversation a rising chromatic scale, moving at two different speeds and building tension as it injected itself into a final full exposition of the fugue subject driving forward all the way to the final bar. In all, it was 135 measures of musical juggernaut, and a fitting capstone to an exhaustingly but gloriously satisfying program.

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© 2024 by Larry Wallach.

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