David Allen

Real storms, if you were at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in the Berkshires here, on Sunday. As the Valkyries saddled up and the conductor, Andris Nelsons, settled down to open the third act of a perfectly solid concert performance of “Die Walküre” that stretched over two days, a mighty thunderclap crashed around the hills with impeccable timing and grandeur.

Not that the performers in this “Walküre” needed much help bringing the atmosphere — they needed more help bringing an audience to Tanglewood’s Shed, which was rather sparsely attended over the weekend. One or two Valkyrie helmets patrolled the grounds, but Wagnerians seem on the whole to have stayed away from this second step, two years after “Das Rheingold,” toward what we can hope eventually becomes a complete “Ring” from these forces.

Surely the crowd didn’t stay away on account of the cast. Christine Goerke was here, after all, in her glory. A soprano surely destined to be the dominant Brünnhilde for years to come, she sang here with commanding authority, surpassing delicacy and total commitment to the text. She is a singer of inordinate communicative gifts: Take the last “Hojotoho!” of her entry at the start of Act 2, which was indomitable, devoted and even coy, all in four syllables.

I would walk through fire to hear her again, just as I would for the spectacular Sieglinde of Amber Wagner, overflowing with power and wrenching in her vulnerability. If the other singers could not match the intensity of these women, James Rutherford proved a fine, movingly human Wotan; Simon O’Neill, an ardent Siegmund; and Franz-Josef Selig, a smart Hunding, properly banal in his evil.

It was a courageous decision to set aside the might and manners of the Boston Symphony proper and hand this — arguably the main event of the summer season — to the trainee players of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. But what players these young instrumentalists are! Between 18 and 29 years old, and here for a couple months’ intensive instruction, they gave a furiously dedicated, technically adept performance.

Much of that was owed to Nelsons, no doubt. An accomplished Wagnerian, he apparently remains exiled from the Bayreuth Wagner Festival after a falling-out three years ago, and the “Ring” he was said to be in line to conduct there in 2020 has gone instead to a rookie, Pietari Inkinen. So the Boston Symphony gets the brunt of his Wagnerian efforts; its coming season at Symphony Hall includes performances of Act 3 of “Tristan,” with Jonas Kaufmann the star attraction.

In “Walküre,” Nelsons was on his usual, supple form, much as in “Das Rheingold.” Perfect was the pace, perfect were the balances, perfect was his support of singers who could easily have been overwhelmed. Exciting if rarely excitable, at its best this was simply gorgeous Wagner — the lavish lullaby with which Wotan lulls Brünnhilde to sleep being just one lush moment among many.

But on the whole, this was practical rather than visionary work — perhaps a little too practical. Much of Nelsons’ tenure in Boston has turned out that way, to my ears. He arrived at the start of the 2014-15 season to a good deal of fanfare and set out his approach in an interview four years ago: “I don’t want to change anything.” Mission accomplished.

There have been awards for recordings; there have been memorable performances, especially of opera; there have been premieres. Nelsons, still just 40, has succeeded in just the way this most stately of American orchestras must have hoped. On the evidence of the performances I have heard in Boston during his tenure, indeed, there can be few surer hands marking time today.

But a music director of Nelsons’ stature does not stand or fall on stability alone. If you’ve expected more — innovation, risk, the unexpected — your hopes may not have been met. At least not yet.

“Die Walküre”

Performed on Saturday and Sunday at Tanglewood, Lenox, Massachusetts.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/arts/music/walkure-wagner-tanglewood-review.html" id="6bbfeaa3-8c2b-3fef-a60f-60dffa730716">The New York Times</a>.

Review: 'Die Walküre' Brings the Thunder to Tanglewood

LENOX, Mass. — Richard Wagner put an obsessive amount of effort into portraying the natural world in the “Ring,” both in his music and how he wanted it staged. Rivers run and rainbows shine in “Das Rheingold.” Forests rustle and murmur in “Siegfried.” And in “Die Walküre,” the second of the four “Ring” dramas, storms howl and rage.

Which makes sense. Opera, as the scholar Catherine Clément has written, is built on “the undoing of women.” So “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel about a dystopian but all-too-possible theocracy built on rituals of rape and repression, was always a natural fit with “Lucia” and “La Traviata.”

Composed by Poul Ruders to a faithful, slightly clunky libretto by the actor and writer Paul Bentley, “The Handmaid’s Tale” had its premiere in Copenhagen nearly two decades ago, and its only production in the United States, at the Minnesota Opera, in 2003.

That’s a shame. The Boston Lyric Opera’s staging, which runs through Sunday, reveals it to be a brilliant, brutal opera, one that should be taken up widely. Even if it is, though, I doubt that it will be done as powerfully. This is a triumph for the Boston company.

Why? For one thing, there’s the matter of location. Under the artistic direction of Esther Nelson, the Lyric had made a habit of taking at least one of its four annual productions out of the opera house even before it lost its home, the Shubert Theater, in 2015. Plenty of companies have been doing the same, and like a lot (though not all) of that work, some of the Lyric’s productions have had only the loosest connection between the sites chosen and the operas presented.

Not this time. Atwood’s book is set in the Republic of Gilead — a future version of Massachusetts, evocative for its Puritan roots. It opens in a gymnasium, a basketball court — probably the very one in which the Lyric’s production takes place: the Lavietes Pavilion, just across the Charles River from Harvard Yard. In the opera, like the novel, we see a descent into dictatorship through the memories of a witness, Offred, who tries to challenge her oppression after being captured by the regime and forced into slavery for her fertility. This production tells her story where she lived it.

Although it is challenging to stage an opera in a sports arena, especially one with a large cast and a very large orchestra, the challenges are surmounted by director Anne Bogart, movement director Shura Baryshnikov and designer James Scheutte. The action takes place at center court, surrounded on three sides by seats and bleachers, and on the fourth by the orchestra, piled in where one hoop ought to be. The buzzer is repurposed as if it were a prison bell. The set is bare; the few props are wheeled on and off by Gilead’s riot police. The sound is better than it has any right to be, helped by a hint of amplification and decent balancing by conductor David Angus.

Ruders’ score is oppressive — too much so for comfortable listening, though that’s probably the point. Cut slightly, and wisely, by the composer for this production to focus the story more on its essentials, it lets up barely at all, except for a remarkably tender, second-act duet between Offred and her past self about her love for a daughter lost to the regime.

The score sets a harsh, dissonant, unrelenting portrait of the power and savagery of Gilead against static, quieter sounds for Offred’s interior life, sounds that always feel profoundly menaced and unhappy. The atmosphere is stifling, resonant of Berg but also, with its use of hymns and an organ, of Britten’s “Peter Grimes.” There is no escape, nor is there joy: Witness the cacophonous, Ivesian punishment that “Amazing Grace” is subjected to in counterpoint to a rape sequence.

Find joy, instead, in the towering account of Offred offered here by mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano. Restless, powerful, profound, she is as formidable as this astonishingly demanding role deserves. Caroline Worra sings Aunt Lydia — the enforcer of mores, the assailer of the weak, the collaborator with the patriarchy — with sadistic relish, half venomous, half gleeful. Among her victims are the resistance member Ofglen, given understanding and sense by Michelle Trainor.

They are not alone in their excellence in a 16-person cast, the women of which sing so well that they make anything seem possible. As the scholar and critic Lucy Caplan notes in a smart program essay, we can see the women of opera as undone, after Catherine Clément — or we can find ways to “defy that ‘undoing.’”

We do not quite know what happens to Offred in the end, as she is hauled away by heavies who might be from the regime, or might be from the resistance. Perhaps the answer is up to us.

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ runs through Sunday at the Lavietes Pavilion, Boston; blo.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/arts/music/handmaids-tale-boston-lyric-opera-review.html" id="1e93ba74-a645-37a6-ab25-c65de932e26c">The New York Times</a>.

BOSTON — Long before the Hulu series, the viral marketing and the protest bonnets, there was the opera.

'The Handmaid's Tale' Is a Brutal Triumph as Opera

With hundreds of “Eroicas” available at the push of a thumb, who, indeed? What could there possibly be left to say?

Quite a lot, as it turns out, and Honeck is saying it with the Pittsburgh Symphony, long one of the finest American ensembles but just a few years past a bruising musicians’ strike. When the orchestra and Honeck, its music director since 2008, arrive in New York to perform Beethoven and Mahler at David Geffen Hall on May 19, five years since they last appeared in the city, they will arrive having built their reputation by recording the standard repertoire, formidably well.

“If I do it,” Honeck said recently in his office in Heinz Hall, the ornate former movie palace in Pittsburgh that houses the symphony, “I want to do it as good as I can do it.”

Good barely covers it. All eight of the releases that the Pittsburgh forces have brought out on Reference Recordings, with the aid of microphone whizzes from Soundmirror, come with the highest of recommendations. (Earlier recordings, primarily of Mahler, are now hard to find on a Japanese imprint, Exton.) Four have received nominations for the Grammy for best orchestral performance. One, of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 and Barber’s Adagio for Strings, won in 2018.

There’s a properly idiomatic account of Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony that comes with a clever suite from Janacek’s “Jenufa,” one of several operatic compilations that Honeck has conceived and had executed by composer Tomas Ille. Another, from Dvorak’s “Rusalka,” appears with a desolate Tchaikovsky Sixth. There’s a radiant, faithful take on Bruckner’s Fourth, which bodes well for that composer’s Ninth, due for release this fall. There are two sensationally powerful discs of Strauss, one of tone poems, the other of suites from “Der Rosenkavalier” and “Elektra.”

And yes, there’s a Beethoven Five, a Beethoven Seven and a Beethoven Three, easily the most enthralling and involving recordings of these most major of major symphonies I have heard in years. The 2015 coupling of the Fifth and Seventh seethes with ideas, transcending tedious debates about period practice to sound utterly fresh and free. The 2018 release of the “Eroica” is better still, showing off the orchestra’s spectacular playing, which marries deft refinement to forceful physicality.

Why are these recordings so breathtakingly good? Plenty of orchestras record, after all, and most record in the same way they do in Pittsburgh. They tape several concerts of the same program live, usually three or four. There’s a patching session to fix errors and correct details. Then there’s editing.

And in this conductor’s case, there’s more editing. Minute editing. Relentless editing.

“Even one note, it can annoy you for weeks,” Honeck said, laughing. “You ask our sound guys. They suffer.”

His fastidious preparation is reflected in the practical, how-to booklet notes that he writes for the recordings, thousands of words long and full of endless detail about the choices he has made. He writes his own bowings. He tinkers with the instrumentation. He reads deeply, and dreams up metaphors to sharpen the imagery.

It’s a technique that Honeck, born in Austria in 1958, learned from the very best. As a violist in the Vienna Philharmonic from 1986 to 1992, he played under a who’s-who of conductors, including Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan. He talked about historical performance with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and assisted Claudio Abbado. But one man stood out.

“The temptation,” Honeck said, “is for conductors to say, ‘Oh, it’s too soft, too loud, too quick, too slow.’ That’s four terms, and within 2 1/2 hours you hear these all the time. You can imagine, it’s boring. But Carlos Kleiber, he asked with every phrase we do, why do we do it? What is the context of the music? He brought pictures, images of that.”

Horn player Stephen Kostyniak, who serves as chairman of the Pittsburgh musicians’ committee, recalled an early appearance, in the period between Honeck turning down the Czech Philharmonic in favor of the Pittsburgh Symphony in January 2007 and when he formally took up the post in September 2008.

“We did ‘Ein Heldenleben’,” Kostyniak said. “He wanted one particular quintuplet rhythm a certain way, because in his mind it’s when Strauss’ wife slaps him and says, ‘Shut up!’”

Honeck, added Kostyniak, was “not one of the tyrants of old, but he’s very particular in what he wants, and he doesn’t mind taking the time out of rehearsal to really make sure that it’s there.”

Kleiber’s example does not stop with evocative imagery. Playing under that enigmatic, combustible genius taught Honeck that conducting is a bodily pursuit, a physical recreation of the sound you want. He painstakingly rehearses the shape and speed of the hand movements he will use to trace a phrase, and the body positions he will need to take up to win the right kind of emphasis. Although Honeck is by no means copying his precursor, a certain similarity of gesture is obvious to anyone who has spent too much time watching old Kleiber videos on YouTube.

“A violinist has the Oistrakh technique, or the Auer technique,” Honeck said. “We forget that conductors also have a technique. It’s not just 1-2-3-4. That’s like a fingering.”

“I found out that this technique brings you to much more refined music-making,” he added.

If Honeck concentrates mostly on the Austro-Germanic repertoire, as some critics worried when he seemed to be a candidate to replace Alan Gilbert as music director of the New York Philharmonic a few years ago, he is not dutifully conservative. In Pittsburgh, he has staged Handel’s “Messiah” and Bach’s “St. John Passion,” and he has not entirely neglected new music. In conversation, he cited Mahler to the effect that “tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire” — a quotation, aptly enough, that may not originally be of Mahler at all, but at least captures his spirit.

But can an orchestra based on tradition survive? Like most other orchestras, the Pittsburgh Symphony has been forced to confront its inherited business model, and since it last visited New York it has seen its fair share of labor strife. A year after Melia P. Tourangeau, the current president and chief executive, arrived in the summer of 2015, the musicians went on strike to defend themselves against cuts to wages and pensions. The strike took 55 days to resolve.

Tourangeau said that “the orchestra sacrificed quite a bit in this last contract: about $3.3 million in concessions, plus shutting down our defined-benefit plan and moving to a 401(k).”

The players have still not recovered the wage levels they lost, and will do so only in the final season of a contract that lasts until 2021. Legacy pension costs remain on the books; endowment draws are only slowly retreating from an unsustainable level; and earned revenue is trending down. Ticket sales, in other words, are a problem. But the orchestra’s sacrifices provided leverage in the community, and contributions have risen sharply. A deficit of $1.3 million in 2015-16 turned into a small surplus in the 2017-18 season, the first in a decade.

“When you look at the finances from an accrual basis,” Tourangeau said, “we’ve certainly turned the ship around.”

And just as at the Minnesota Orchestra, which rebuilt itself after a 16-month lockout that ended in 2014, Pittsburgh’s trouble has brought management, staff, players and audience closer together. Musicians now sit on every board committee, and they organize to greet patrons on their way into the hall before performances, and play brief chamber-music concerts after. Staff and trustees take part in initiatives that the musicians started while on strike, including helping communities underserved with both food and music in partnership with a local charity, 412 Food Rescue. This community-conscious approach was reflected in a televised concert that the orchestra mounted in response to the deadly shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue last October.

“Now we have this culture of involvement and transparency that is new and good,” Kostyniak said. “It’s definitely more positive and forward-looking.”

Honeck stayed quiet during the strike, but said that he was two or three weeks away from speaking out when it ended, and would have done so if red lines about the size of the orchestra, the number of concerts it played and its ability to tour were crossed. Now, he said, “I feel that the climate is more positive.”

He demurred about what will happen in 2022, when the contract he extended in 2018 ends. But before then, there is more to record, starting with Beethoven’s Ninth and a new double concerto by Jonathan Leshnoff in June, followed by Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 next season. All of them, it’s fair to predict, will have that distinctive stamp on them, the sense of a familiar piece being rethought from the ground up.

“We conductors, we are personalities,” Honeck said. “I would hate it if every conductor must be similar. It’s actually the opposite. Let’s go for personality. Let’s go for a personal style.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="1d2acc2d-3454-3109-a9ed-9726fd03d68a" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/arts/music/manfred-honeck-pittsburgh-symphony-lincoln-center.html">The New York Times</a>.

The Pittsburgh Symphony Sets a New Standard for the Standards

PITTSBURGH — “What is the reason to bring out a Beethoven Five, or Seven, or Three?” conductor Manfred Honeck asked, turning to the question of recordings of canonical symphonies. “Another CD in the world. My God, who cares?”

The Pittsburgh Symphony sets a new standard for the standards

His death was confirmed by the German broadcaster SWR.

Gielen was active mostly in Europe, and one of his most important posts was as general music director of the Frankfurt Opera, a job he held for a decade starting in 1977. There he gave the German premieres of works by Luigi Nono and Alban Berg, revived overlooked works by Ferruccio Busoni and Franz Schreker, and invited the most ambitious directors to stage standard repertory.

Working with the dramaturge Klaus Zehelein, Gielen collaborated with Jürgen Flimm, Harry Kupfer, Hans Neuenfels (including for a pivotal “Aida” in 1980) and Ruth Berghaus, who produced Wagner’s “Ring” in notably symbolic fashion.

In 1987, John Rockwell of The New York Times called the Frankfurt house “the most prominent exponent in the world of radical operatic stage direction and design.”

Gielen was music director of the Cincinnati Symphony from 1980 to 1986, and his radical programming there alienated many. The next year he found a more congenial home back in Germany as chief conductor of the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden, which became the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg in 1996.

That orchestra, backed by the resources of German state radio, gave him the freedom to promote the newest of music, especially at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, a festival in southern Germany for contemporary composers. He remained the orchestra’s permanent guest conductor after stepping down in 1999, and later protested its merger with a sister ensemble in Stuttgart.

His SWR orchestra recordings included a particularly lucid Mahler cycle, the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, and pieces by Bruckner, Stravinsky and the composers of the Second Viennese School. All prized detail and restraint over overt emotionality.

The conductor Daniel Barenboim, who knew Gielen for almost 70 years and appointed him principal guest conductor of the Staatskapelle Berlin in 1999, said that Gielen had always been “in search of what he considered the musical truth, for the solutions that were given to him by the score — and not by outside ideas.”

Gielen, who won the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2010, viewed music as a disciplined intellectual pursuit that, more than providing comfort or entertainment, should shed light on the conflicts of the age, both in the world at large and in humanity’s inner life. He particularly argued for confronting the horrors of the mid-20th century, represented by Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

“If musical life does not convey this central experience of our time, which is the ‘Age of Anxiety,'” he said, “then it is not a cultural life, but a cultural lie.”

Gielen conveyed his views through programming. A typical ploy was to preface Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Schoenberg’s reflection on the Holocaust, “A Survivor From Warsaw.” He even inserted the piece between the symphony’s heavenly slow movement and its paean to human brotherhood, the “Ode to Joy.”

In a program note for the Cincinnati Symphony, Gielen wrote, “The greatness of the Ninth, its beauty, the shattering horror of the fanfare that begins its finale, these can fully reach us today only when we confront the other side of man.”

Michael Andreas Gielen was born July 20, 1927, in Dresden. His mother, Rose Steuermann, was an actress and soprano noted for her account of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire;” his father, Josef Gielen, was a director at the city’s state theater, entrusted by Richard Strauss with the premieres of “Arabella” and “Die Schweigsame Frau.”

Though their mother was Jewish, Michael and his older sister, Carola, were baptized as Catholics in 1935, but the Nazis hounded them all the same. They followed their father first to Berlin, then to Vienna, and finally to Buenos Aires, in 1940.

In Argentina, Gielen was brought up among an exiled musical elite. He studied piano and composition under Erwin Leuchter, who had been Anton Webern’s assistant, and heard the operatic repertoire under the baton of Fritz Busch.

After he withdrew from the University of Buenos Aires in 1946 and became a coach at the Teatro Colón, Gielen rehearsed “Tristan und Isolde” with soprano Kirsten Flagstad and conductor Erich Kleiber in 1948. When Wilhelm Furtwängler led Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion in 1950, Gielen played the recitatives.

Again following his father, Gielen returned to Europe in 1950, and to the Vienna State Opera, where he assisted Clemens Krauss, Dmitri Mitropoulos and Karl Böhm. He continued to compose, and his Variations for String Quartet (1949) were performed in Darmstadt, the home of postwar experimentalism. But podium opportunities proved more alluring, and Gielen became a staff conductor at the opera, leading everything from Mozart to Honegger.

As the music director of the Royal Swedish Opera from 1960 to 1965, Gielen oversaw a radical production of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” with Ingmar Bergman directing.

As a guest conductor Gielen had a string of successes in famously challenging new music, overseeing the premieres in 1965 alone of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Requiem in Stockholm, Aribert Reimann’s “Traumspiel” in Kiel and, in Cologne, Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Die Soldaten,” a major but neglected work of the last century. He was at the helm of the Belgian National Orchestra from 1969 to 1973 and the Netherlands Opera from 1973 to 1975.

Survivors include his wife, Helga Gielen, a soprano he married in 1957; their two children, Claudia and Lucas; and several grandchildren.

Among Gielen’s compositions was “Pflicht und Neigung” (1988), which he recorded together with works by Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Eduard Steuermann, his uncle, as a tribute to those 20th-century figures. The title translates to “Duty and Inclination.”

“In order to make musical life meaningful, profoundly meaningful,” he told The Times in 1982, “one needs this kind of music as part of the program. I cannot live with the conscience of the truth being there waiting to be said and not being said.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/obituaries/michael-gielen-dead.html" id="8b5e823e-0097-307b-a7f4-f16f6ca77d3e">The New York Times</a>.

Michael Gielen, a probing conductor who championed contemporary music and daring opera productions, died Friday at his home near Mondsee, Austria, east of Salzburg. He was 91.

Michael Gielen, Uncompromising German Maestro, Is Dead at 91

His death was announced by the St. Albans International Organ Festival, which he founded in 1963.

Hurford made his name internationally by recording Bach’s complete organ works for Decca in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

When the record industry was booming, such an encyclopedic endeavor was almost the norm for organists of stature. Many managed it once; a few, like Helmut Walcha, achieved it twice; Marie-Claire Alain somehow did it three times.

But while other organists might have had a loftier vision for this music, none played it on record with quite the commitment to authenticity and the all-around good sense of Hurford.

His playing was “characterized by brisk tempi, a strong sense of rhythm and highly articulated musical lines,” Thomas Trotter, organist of the city of Birmingham and St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster Abbey, wrote in an email. “At the time it was a breath of fresh air, and a revelation to hear the music of Bach dance.”

New York Times music critic John Rockwell wrote in 1983, when the Bach cycle was completed, that while “Mr. Hurford is not the flashiest or most eccentric of players,” his Bach was “deeply, eminently satisfying.”

Simplicity and clarity defined Hurford’s approach to the organ. And although he often played grander romantic works, he saw the century or so between the birth of Buxtehude in 1637 and the death of Bach in 1750 as the pinnacle of his instrument.

For a chapter on Bach in “Making Music on the Organ,” a handbook he published in 1988, Hurford took a verse from Keats that reflected his effective, straightforward approach: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Peter John Hurford was born Nov. 22, 1930, in Minehead, Somerset, England, the son of Hubert Hurford, a lawyer, and Gladys (James) Hurford. He trained under composer and organist Harold Darke and became an organ scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied music and law.

After military service and further study with French organist André Marchal, who inculcated in him a love of the Baroque, Hurford became organist at Holy Trinity Church, in Leamington Spa in central England. In 1958 he became organist and master of the music at St. Albans Cathedral, just north of London.

Firmly rooted in the tradition of English church music, and a composer of organ and choral pieces himself, Hurford remained at St. Albans until 1978 and oversaw the installation of a new organ there by English builder Harrison &amp; Harrison.

Andrew Davis, the music director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago and a boyhood student of Hurford’s, recalled his “incomparable music-making, boyish charm and infectious enthusiasm,” especially during the construction of the organ in St. Albans.

“He was, every week, like a kid with a new toy,” Davis said in an email. “One day I remember ascending to the organ loft to find him grinning from ear to ear. ‘Go and stand by the Positive,’ he said, ‘the Crumhorn has arrived!’ ” Davis recounted, referring to a section of pipes and its new addition. “He played a chord on the new stop and almost blew my head off.”

In addition to the Bach project, which Hurford reprised by performing the works for BBC radio, he made solo recordings for Decca of composers, including César Franck, Felix Mendelssohn and Paul Hindemith. He also recorded Handel’s Organ Concertos with Joshua Rifkin and Saint-Saëns and Poulenc with Charles Dutoit.

In the early 1980s Hurford was visiting artist-in-residence at the Sydney Opera House, where he oversaw the completion of the organ in its concert hall. He served as president of the Royal College of Organists from 1980 to 1982 and was made an officer of Order of the British Empire in 1984.

In 1955 he married Patricia Matthews, who died in 2017. His survivors include a daughter, Heather; two sons, Michael and Richard; and nine grandchildren.

Hurford performed the works of Bach in a series of 15 concerts at the Edinburgh Festival in 1997. In an interview, he was asked what made Bach’s music so powerful.

“It’s his simultaneous mastery of technique and ability to convey what is deepest in his spirit in the music that he writes,” he replied. “The challenge is one of expressing this on an instrument which is arguably the most difficult to make music on — the organ.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/obituaries/peter-hurford-dead.html" id="bffe9a68-f13f-34c3-ac7f-b2bf473abf5a">The New York Times</a>.

Peter Hurford, a British organist, composer and choir director known for his incisive, buoyant recordings of Bach, died March 3 in St. Albans, England, just north of London. He was 88.

Peter Hurford, Organist Noted for His Complete Bach, Dies at 88

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