Summer Organ Series has a diverse repertoire

What: Summer Organ Series When/where: June 8, 15 and 22, 7:30 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral. Tickets: $20, series $45. In person at Munro’s Books, Ivy’s Bookshop and the cathedral office What: Victoria Mendelssohn Choir: Agnus Dei When/where: Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Chapel of the New Jerusalem (Christ Church Cathedral); Sunday, 3 p.m., SHOAL Centre (10030 Resthaven Dr., Sidney) Tickets: $20. In person at Ivy’s Bookshop, Russell Books, Tanner’s Books, the SHOAL Centre and the cathedral office.

Christ Church Cathedral’s annual Summer Organ Series is returning, as usual comprising three concerts on consecutive Friday evenings.

This popular series was inaugurated in 2008 as a showcase for the cathedral’s splendid Helmuth Wolff organ, completed three years earlier at a cost of more than $2 million. (It is the city’s largest organ, and one of the largest mechanical-action pipe organs in Canada.) Over the years, the summer series has been a forum for local organists as well as visitors from Canada, the U.S. and abroad.

This year’s three performers all have international concert careers, though very different backgrounds and interests.

Friday’s concert will feature Michael Kleinschmidt, who held church positions in New York, Portland and Boston before becoming director of music at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, in Seattle, in 2015. On June 15, the cathedral will welcome a rising star, Alcee Chriss III, a doctoral candidate at McGill University, in Montreal, studying both organ and harpsichord. Chriss has won several competitions over the past five years, including the 2017 Canadian International Organ Competition. The series will close on June 22 with a performance by Donald Hunt, who is just completing his first year as Christ Church’s director of music. Raised in Halifax and a graduate of McGill, Hunt spent a decade based in the U.K., where he held positions in London and Edinburgh and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists, before moving here last summer.

The repertoire will be as diverse as the personnel.

Kleinschmidt will offer a wideranging all-French program spanning 1878 to 1942, comprising works by César Franck, Louis Vierne, Olivier Messiaen, Jehan Alain and Maurice Duruflé (the latter’s prelude and fugue in homage to Alain, with a theme derived from that name).

Chriss’s program, though it begins and ends soberly, with prelude-and-fugue pairs by Bach and Reger, mostly comprises more recherché fare, including works by Florence Price (18871953), an African-American whose significant body of work has recently been rediscovered, and the Canadian organist and composer Rachel Laurin, who lives in Quebec. Chriss, who also plays jazz piano, will perform two selections drawn from virtuosic arrangements by the great jazz pianist Art Tatum, including Tea for Two.

Hunt’s program, too, spans centuries and genres, including works by Buxtehude and Handel and by English organist-composers (Ireland, Bairstow, Howells, Harris), as well as an intriguing novelty — an arrangement of the beloved Adagietto movement from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.

As always, a video feed projected onto a screen in front of the altar will allow the audience to watch the organists in action in their hidden loft. The Victoria Mendelssohn Choir, founded and directed by Simon Leung, made its debut in 2014 and performed most recently in January. As its name suggests, the choir is particularly devoted to Classical and Romantic music, though its repertoire to date has ranged very widely, from the 16th through 20th centuries.

(The auditioned choir currently has close to 30 members and is seeking more, especially men and younger singers. Details from Katie Pirquet, katie001@telus.net.)

In its two performances this weekend, the choir will offer a program devoted to religious music, some of it liturgical, some not, including pieces by Bach and Fauré, Mozart’s gorgeous late motet Ave verum corpus, selections from larger works by Mendelssohn and Bruckner and a setting of Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd”) by the contemporary English composer Howard Goodall.

The highlight of the program is a major work of the sacred choral repertoire of which I can find no record of a local performance, at least in recent years: CharlesFrançois Gounod’s Messe solennelle de Sainte Cécile, composed in 1855 to honour Cecilia, the patron saint of music. This grand, immensely rich 50-minute work, the best-known of Gounod’s 21 Masses, is scored for mixed choir, three vocal soloists, orchestra and organ, though this weekend the accompaniment will be a piano reduction.

Interspersed among the choral works will be two vocal solos featuring soprano Olivia Kang (the famous Ave Maria settings of Bach-Gounod and Schubert), plus a piano duet.