This Sunday's concert features organist Johannes Berger and trombonist Ian Bousfield.

The Auditorio de Tenerife, in collaboration with San Miguel Arcángel Royal Canarian Academy of Fine Arts, is offering one of the concerts of its organ cycle this Sunday (22 February) at noon, in the Symphony Hall. The performance Órgano y trombón: barroco y vanguardia (Organ and Trombone: Baroque and Avant-Garde) brings together organist Johannes Berger and trombonist Ian Bousfield.

This musical journey from Baroque to avant-garde, led by organ and trombone, begins with Johann Sebastian Bach, in one of his most recognisable symphonic works, opening the programme and the organ’s voice. The journey then travels back to the early Baroque and Giovanni Martino Cesare, an Italian musician who worked in several noble houses in Bavaria as a cornet player and composed several Canzone. His work La Hieronyma was published in 1621.

The concert then returns to Bach and his arrangement of Marcello’s Oboe Concerto. Such arrangements were common practice during the period, as artists used transcriptions to study their contemporaries’ works. An example of this is Bach’s Concerto for Four Pianos, based on Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins.

Felix Mendelssohn was an admirer of Bach who revived interest in his works during the Romantic period. Well-versed in traditional German sacred music, Mendelssohn served as director of the Gewandhaus concert hall in Leipzig between 1835 and 1841 and went on to found there the first music university in Germany in 1843. His work Variations Sérieuses op. 54 was composed for solo piano to raise funds for the erection of a bronze statue of Ludwig van Beethoven in his hometown of Bonn.

Kol Nidrei is among the best-known works of composer Max Bruch. It is based on the Kol Nidre declaration, which is recited during the evening service on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in Judaism. Although Max Bruch was a Protestant, the publication of this work led many to assume that he was Jewish, which in turn resulted in his compositions being restricted in Nazi Germany.

The programme leaps forward to the present day with Franco-Lebanese composer Naji Hakim, whose Arabesques was a set piece in the organ category of the 2011 ARD Music Competition. “Regarding this suite for organ, Hakim has stated that singing and dancing are at its very core, and that it is built on the exchange and mutual influence between jazz and traditional Mediterranean music.

This Sunday’s concert continues with the music of Russian-German composer Alfred Schnittke, born in 1934 in the Soviet Union to a Jewish father from Frankfurt and a Volga German mother. His oeuvre is an example of the ongoing exchange between Eastern and Western Europe. Although his compositions were highly successful in Western Europe, in the Soviet Union, they were considered too experimental and unsuitable for representing the government’s cultural policies.

The performance draws to a close with a work of French organist Alexandre Guilmant, who caused a sensation with his performances at the ceremonies inaugurating the organs of Saint-Sulpice and Notre-Dame in Paris. He founded the Schola Cantorum music school in Paris and later taught organ at the Conservatory of Paris (coinciding with the appointment of Gabriel Fauré as the school’s director). Guilmant’s Morceau Symphonique, composed in 1902, was a competition work at the Conservatory of Paris that same year.

Johannes Berger began receiving instruction on several keyboard instruments during his childhood. At 11 years of age, he was admitted into the circle of students of Munich-born organ teacher Franz Lehrndorfer. After graduating from secondary school, he studied organ, harpsichord and sacred music at the Higher School of Music in Munich. Berger has been awarded prizes in competitions at home and abroad, including the Grand Prix Bach de Lausanne, where he also won the People’s Choice Award.

One of the most influential brass players of our time, now a soloist, conductor, and pedagogue, Ian Bousfield has been at the top for over 40 years, having formerly been principal trombone of the Vienna Philharmonic and the London Symphony, in an orchestral career spanning three decades. With over 70 of his former students now working professionally, some at the highest possible level, he may be considered one of the most successful brass pedagogues of all time.

Tickets can be purchased at a single price of €15 and €5 for the audience under 30 years on the website www.auditoriodetenerife.com, at the auditorium’s box office or by dialling the phone number 902 317 327 from Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. There are discounts for students, unemployed and large families.