Abroad – Pacific Baroque Festival 2025: Peace, Friendship and Joy

Second concert of Pacific Baroque Festival 2025 featuring Aaron James (Toronto) performing works written for the grand cathedrals of Europe on Christ Church Cathedral’s renowned Wolff organ.
Why stay at home when there’s a whole world to explore? In the organ lofts of Europe’s great cathedrals, Baroque keyboard players had unparalleled resources for musical expression, with all the grandeur and drama you could wish for. This program will take us on a musical tour of seventeenth-century Europe, stopping at the great churches of five major cities to hear the resident organists improvising: Seville, Rome, Augsburg, Passau, and Lübeck. The Wolff organ and the space of Christ Church Cathedral provide an ideal instrument and setting for this program, which features some of the gloriously colourful South German music that inspired Helmuth Wolff to build this instrument. This second concert in Pacific Baroque Festival 2025 will be a contrast to Tuesday’s intimate concert on the Brombaugh organ at St Barnabas Church. This concert is also part of Christ Church Cathedral’s ‘Year of the Organ’ series.