Organ master Zerer does Bach proud

By Grant Menzies
For The Register-Guard

In all the ways that matter, J.S. Bach and the pipe organ were made for each other. The organ was, after all, young Bach's first exposure to music. As he became the greatest master of the instrument of his age, both as performer and composer, the organ evolved to meet his demands, brought to perfection by Bach's near-contemporary Gottfried Silbermann.

I would further suggest that the organ was actually Bach's outlet for the sort of tonal color palette that the conventional orchestral ensemble of the day could not provide him. What we revere in Bach's orchestral works, even the operatic cantatas and passions, is not their color so much as their structure, their architecture and ideas. With more stops offering not just variegated sonorities but also various sound effects, the ever-improving pipe organ gave Bach a smorgasbord ripe for the wallow, and nary an organ work from his pen but makes the most of the opportunity.

These colors and textures certainly dazzled in Saturday's recital at Central Lutheran Church, the penultimate performance of this season's Oregon Bach Festival. That dazzle came courtesy, in part, of the church's magnificent lead-piped organ by John Brombaugh.

But German organist Wolfgang Zerer was the star of the show, although not because he dazzled in the manner of some organ masters. Sitting amid a forest of nearly 3,000 pipes, much carved and gilded wood, three manuals of keys under one's fingers and pedals under one's feet, and high in the rafters of a church, is pretty close to occupying a throne, and has inspired a few famed organists to go over the top in interpretation and style.

Such was not the case with Zerer. The 40-something organist from Passau (now teaching at Hamburg's College of Music and Theatre and the College of Music in The Netherlands), with his mildness of manner and soulfulness of style, gave us Bach of a purity not only to match the sweet voicing of the organ, but to speak in tones that would surely be recognizable to the immortal taskmaster Johann Sebastian himself.

An organist cannot influence tone through touch-there's no damper pedal, as with the piano, to help achieve legato lines or harmonic shading. He can make the volume swell or fade, and use the composer's directions regarding which stops to pull to color which passages, but that's about all the control available. Superb fingering, agility, ease and adventurousness of rhythm and strong vision for the overall scope of a given work are what make a great organist. Zerer has all these, and another gift beside: the balance, poise and quiet insight of a poet.

This gift infused the whole range of the evening's program with lambent beauty. Bach's Sonata in D Minor was offered up rich with gorgeous control, not only in the silken parallel trills of the first movement and prayerlike singing lines of the Adagio second, but also in the crisp dancing rhythms of the final section.

Even the clarion call of the Toccata and Fugue in F had in it a sort of meditational core through Zerer's interpretation. Buxtehude's Toccata in F rolled out with all the solemn majesty of a royal procession, recalling echoes of the mature works of Buxtehude's great admirer, a certain J. S. Bach of Eisenach. And Georg Muffat's Toccata septima of 1690 flew past like a flock of fluttering birds (and in one section sounded like them, via the organ's sound effects)

Although he deserved the standing ovation given him at the recital's end, Zerer was right to extend the organ a gesture of homage. Installed at Central Lutheran in 1976 and styled after works of great organ builders of the 16th and 17th centuries, Brombaugh's instrument is a rare jewel. Not even the great Silbermann thought to use the more sonorous, enriching lead-alloy pipes: he settled for tin. Lucky Eugene to have not just the Bach Festival in its midst, but this work of art and its master builder here, too.