Christopher Herrick

Christopher Herrick

Christopher Herrick (born May 23, 1942 in Bletchley or Buckinghamshire ) is an English organist and harpsichordist.

Herrick was a choirboy at St Paul's Cathedral and attended their choir school. He sang at Queen Elizabeth II's coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey in 1953 and appeared in the White House before President Dwight D. Eisenhower that same year .

Since 1944 Herrick had organ lessons from Sir John Dykes Bower , the organist at St. Paul's. He continued organ training during his visit to Cranleigh School and studied music at Exeter College , Oxford from 1959 to 1962 , then at the Royal College of Music . He also took harpsichord lessons with Millicent Silver , private organ lessons with Geraint Jones and studied conducting with Sir Adrian Boult . As a harpsichordist, he founded the Taskin Trio , with whom he performed baroque music on period instruments, and led the entire Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach in London on.

From 1967 to 1974 Herrick was organist at St Paul's Cathedral, then at Westminster Abbey. In 1984 he began a career as a concert organist, which he initiated with a solo appearance at the Proms . Under the title Organ Fireworks , Hyperion Records released a twelve-part series of recordings of virtuoso and effective compositions by Camille Saint-Saëns , André Jolivet , Dmitri Shostakowitsch , Charles-Marie Widor , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , Carl Nielsen , Edward Elgar , Johann Pachelbel , Franz Liszt , John Rutter and others. A contrasting series of recordings under the title Organ Dreams includes four albums so far.

Between 1989 and 1999 Herrick recorded the entire organ works of Bach for Hyperion on Swiss Metzler organs . At the 1998 Lincoln Center Festival he performed Bach's entire organ work in a fourteen-part concert series on the Kuhn organ at Alice Tully Hall . He recorded the Noels Louis-Claude Daquins at the Parisot organ of the Saint-Rémy church in Dieppe, followed in 2003 by a recording of the entire work for keyboard instruments by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck on a replica of a 17th century organ in Sweden. In 2007 Herrick began to record all of Dietrich Buxtehude's organ works .

Web links

• Christopher Herrick's homepage