GUILFORD — Friends of Music at Guilford (FOMAG) is hosting its seventh annual Spring Recital and Holiday Cookout beginning at 3 p.m. on Sunday, May 24, at Tree Frog Farm.
This year's Tracker Organ program focuses on music from the North German baroque, repertory for which the circa-1897 instrument is uniquely suited, according to organizers.
All the works on the program, except one, are concerted. The exception is Dietrich Buxtehude's Toccata in F, played by the afternoon's guest organist, Ken Olsson. It starts the show with some virtuosic fireworks.
Following the Buxtehude are pieces by composers that might be called his legatees. Johann Sebastian Bach, who once walked 250 miles to meet the master and hear him play, is represented by two works: the tiny Canonic Trio in F and the exuberant Sonata in D major for viola da gamba and keyboard. Then comes a Trio Sonata in B-flat by Georg Philipp Telemann.
The final piece is a Bach cantata - not, however, by Bach. Meine Seele rühmt und preist (“My soul exalts and praises”) was long listed as his Cantata 189 but is now known to have been written by the Dresden composer Melchior Hoffmann. Hoffmann succeeded Telemann as music director of the Neue Kirche in Leipzig, a post which Bach had coveted but lost to Telemann.
Michael Duffin is tenor soloist in the Hoffmann cantata, assisted by the Guilford Chamber Players.
Both the Bach Canonic Sonata and the Hoffmann Cantata have appeared periodically over the decades on programs with the Guilford Tracker Organ. Those performances were presided over by the late A. Graham Down, who installed the instrument in the Organ Barn and thus planted the seeds for Friends of Music at Guilford a half-century ago.
The Organ Barn is at Tree Frog Farm, 158 Kopkind Road, off Packer Corners Road in Guilford.