Music department presents the first concert in its Bach organ recital series

The Department of Music is presenting a two-semester series of organ recitals commemorating the 250th anniversary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. Assistant Professor David Yearsley kicks off the "Bach in Sage 2000" series Feb. 20 at 3 p.m. in Sage Chapel. The second event is March 3, with guest organist Jonathan Biggers, and Annette Richards, festival director and university organist, concludes this semester's offerings April 7. The concerts are free and open to the public.

Yearsley opens his program with the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C, BWV 564, and closes with Prelude and Fugue in E, BWV 548. He also plays transcriptions of a Trio Sonata (BWV 526) and one of Vivaldi's concertos for two violins and cello (BWV 596), as well as Canonic Variations on the Christmas hymn "Vom Himmel hoch komm ich daher" (BWV 769a).

Also included in the program is Bach's chorale prelude on "Vor deinen Thron," known as the "death-bed" chorale. Bach's student F.W. Marpurg wrote that Bach, stricken by blindness, "extemporaneously dictated" the chorale to his son-in-law a few days before his death. In fact, the piece is a reworking of an "Orgelbüchlein" piece written by Bach some 35 years earlier. "Vor deinen Thron" strips this original version of its elaborate ornamentation and expands the piece through the insertion of finely wrought imitative counterpoint between each line of the chorale.

A native of Seattle, Yearsley was educated at Harvard and Stanford, where he received his Ph.D. in music history. First prize winner at the 1994 Bruges Early Music Festival, Yearsley enjoys an active recital career throughout the United States and Europe as an organist, harpsichordist and clavichordist. His scholarly work has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music & Letters and the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, and his recording of the music of Delphin and Nicolaus Adam Strungk, played on the historic Arp Schnitger organ in Germany, recently was issued on Loft; his Bach, Scarlatti, Handel is forthcoming from the same label.