An Expressive Organ Prelude to L.A.’s Annual Bach Festival

There are many concerts and events this year commemorating the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death. But the Los Angeles Bach Festival has never needed that kind of calendar stimulus to celebrate. The 67th annual edition--very much solid, satisfying business as usual--opened Friday with a powerful primer on Bach’s organ music, courtesy of Joan Lippincott.

Among the American organist’s many virtues is a steadfast resistance to florid registrational effects, despite the manifold temptations of the enormous resources at her disposal in the mammoth instrument at First Congregational Church. She did effectively contrast and combine the two main organs at the front and rear of the church, but otherwise let the Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV 547, and the Toccata and Fugue, BWV 540, flourish without fuss.

These monuments of dancing logic were developed with clarity and strength, well paced and fully expressive. Lippincott played the Passacaglia in C minor, BWV 582, with equal integrity, though naturally more variety of color, particularly in the central manual variations.

She displayed more of the organs’ solo stops in the contrasting works in the middle of each half of her comprehensive program. Indeed, for those seated nearer the rear gallery, the solo tunes in the first two of her three chorales nearly obliterated the supporting contrapuntal web. But the Trio Sonata in E flat, BWV 525, was a balanced wonder of rigorous freedom and grace--the great Bachian paradox of metaphysical abstractions given exuberant musical life.