Organ Recital by John Renke
Works by Bruhns, Franck, and Guilmant
The Cathedral of Christ the Light
2121 Harrison Street, Oakland
March 29, 2025
On the western arm of Oakland’s Lake Merritt stands a sort of spiked oval, dwarfed by surrounding commercial buildings just as prosaically glass-heavy as it is. I’ve heard the Cathedral of Christ the Light referred to as “the hat box,” a fair critique considering its rather odd-looking exterior. But step inside and the structure explodes into an expansive open space somehow vastly larger than its outside glass carapace suggests. And when music fills this place, the acoustics of its design are revealed, part and parcel of the sacred space’s vaulting heights.
A 58-foot-high figure of Christ, based on a Romanesque façade of Chartres Cathedral and composed of 94,000 laser-cut perforations on aluminum panels, greets entrants, light piercing through. Light also filters gently in through the glass, mitigated by slatted, curving wood lattice walls over correspondingly semicircular pews; and through the overhead Vesica Piscis, Latin for “fish’s bladder.”
I’ve visited the Cathedral ever since it was dedicated in 2008, so I’m familiar with its grand pipe organ. But I’d never come for an organ recital. John Renke, the cathedral’s organist, was to perform works by Nicolaus Bruhns, César Franck, and Felix-Alexandre Guilmant. I was eager to hear Bruhns’s “Prelude and Fugue in E minor,” curious how the intense seventeenth century piece would sound inside the cathedral’s dome.
Boom! Bruhns’s opening fugue shook forth! Renke brought the robust, solemn work to life, the vibrations of the deep bass notes physically resonant to anyone with a body. That opening fugal flourish and the concluding fugue are connected by a long, free-flowing passage that is at points almost sprightly, making the piece’s stately finale that much more beautiful.
I was less than bowled over by the Franck and Guilmant works, but not due to Renke’s lack of musical prowess. They were just too contemporary for my taste, composed in the mid- and late-nineteenth centuries respectively. I was, however, rather fond of the “Choral et Fugue” movement of Guilmant’s Sonata V, where the organ’s trumpets stand alone for moments before giving way to slow, pulsing majors.
After the recital I remarked to Renke on his rendering of the Bruhns work and he agreed that it too was his favorite of the program. He was lightly sheened with sweat and looked fatigued. Playing a pipe organ is a terribly physical effort, with a great deal of stamina required to navigate the multiple keyboards and the pedals at the same time.
I also spoke with Mr. Renke’s page-turner, Raja Orr, an organist in his own right, most recently at Saint Joan of Arc in Yountville. “That felt like it was only ten minutes!” he said of the performance. Orr was hired as organist at Saint Leo the Great in Oakland only a week earlier.
Indeed, time flies when you’re deep in concentration reading a score along with the performer.
“I just came in here to study… but there was this!" One man said after the music concluded. The Cathedral of Christ the Light is open most days to anyone who wants a place of peace and stillness, but apparently this was a welcome distraction or he likely would have left at the first reverberations of the organ’s thunderous pipes.
Bravo!
“Prelude and Fugue in E minor” by Nicolaus Bruhns (1685-1697)
John Renke has been the organist at Grace Cathedral, Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Saint Ignatius Church, Saint Dominic Church, and the National Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi, all in his native San Francisco. He was also Organist and Director of Music at Saint Andrew Cathedral in Honolulu. And he founded the Schola Cantorum San Francisco.
