Christopher Herrick (Organist)
For ten years Christopher Herrick served as the organist at Westminster
Abbey where he played at numerous Royal and State occasions as well as
performing over two hundred recitals. Since 1984 he has enjoyed a highly
successful international career as a freelance concert organist. “He is
a virtuoso, no question. He was at the peak of his considerable form,
combining precision with panache, interpretive freedom with sheer joy
in virtuosity. The playing was, in a word, triumphal.”
The New York Times critic wrote this review after hearing
Christopher Herrick play the complete organ works of Johann Sebastian Bach
during the 1998 Lincoln Center Festival. The invitation to undertake
this challenging project – to give fourteen concerts on fourteen
consecutive days – came directly because of the success of Herrick’s
sixteen Bach discs for Great Britain’s finest classical recording company,
Hyperion Records. “These CDs were all recorded on Metzler organs
in Switzerland. “Herrick has been presenting a different instrument
from this fine builder in each of his Bach recordings and every one is
a revelation,” said BBC Music Magazine’s Top 1000 CDs Guide.
The Good CD Guide in turn described his playing as
“scholarly, erudite, infinitely rewarding and so easily communicative one is
barely aware one is absorbing some of the most complex and intellectually
demanding ideas.” “In total, Hyperion has released over forty CDs by
Herrick. Highlights of the organist’s career include a complete Bach
fourteen-day marathon in New York, his own Organ Prom as part
of the BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts at the Royal Albert Hall
(London), opening the Stockholm International Organ Festival, a series
of inaugural concerts on the Rieger organ in Christchurch Town Hall
(New Zealand) and dedicating numerous organs in the USA.
“The organist’s “most engrossing hobby is omnivorous reading and this
has recently led on to the dangerous hobby of book-collecting...”
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