Fort Erie church organist brings Coldplay to St. Paul’s church

St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Fort Erie ran out of ground-floor pews on Sunday for a free concert of Coldplay and Beatles songs played on a pipe organ more than 100 years old.

St. Paul’s music director Chris Bohdanowicz played his fourth annual free concert on the Idylewylde Street church’s organ to break the stereotype that the instrument belongs only in religious services.

“The organ is the king of instruments,” Bohdanowicz told Fort Erie Radio. “We just have a palette of all the colours necessary to paint music.”

Bohdanowicz presides over the Niagara chapter of Organ Canada and spent the summer studying at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., to prepare Sunday’s program.

The audience stood and sang a verse of ‘Amazing Grace’ before Bohdanowicz played “some very cheeky jazz variations” on the hymn by Quebec City composer Denis Bédard.

Bohdanowicz said he chose the Beatles’ ‘Across the Universe’ and Coldplay’s ‘Viva la Vida’ to play alongside two Bach pieces because many listeners need a tune they already know.

“People already have melodies in their head that they love hearing over and over again, and if you serve it up to them in a slightly different way, it’ll really hit the target,” said Bohdanowicz.

Some audience members told Bohdanowicz they had missed only one of his four concerts at St. Paul’s, and others told him they had never watched an organist play.

“Oddly enough, I had really never played Beatles music,” said Bohdanowicz. “That was the music of my childhood, but it was totally separate from my endeavours to play music.”

St. Paul’s charged no admission on Sunday and collected free-will offerings for the church’s music program.

Six or seven builders worked on the St. Paul’s organ over more than 100 years, Bohdanowicz said, and some pipes probably came second-hand from St. Paul’s Cathedral in Buffalo.

Bohdanowicz practised Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in A minor for about a year before he performed the piece for the Fort Erie audience.

Bohdanowicz said a later St. Paul’s concert will bring harp and woodwinds into the sanctuary, and he will probably add an ABBA cover to next year’s organ concert.

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