Mari Ohki Faces a Transcendent Bach
Playing through his complete works becomes a musical apprenticeship
Earlier this year, I went with a couple of colleagues to meet organist Mari Ohki on the campus of Meiji Gakuin University. (See last week’s Ikebana Bach.) A young star in Japan’s pipe organ world, Ohki graduated from Tokyo’s Fine Arts University (Gedai), then studied in northern Germany for several years. She was the first Japanese to win the Buxtehude Price in Lübeck. She is currently lecturer at Kobe College and Toyo Eiwa Jogakuin University and, since 2018, hall organist at Kawasaki Muza.
During our two-hour-long interview, we inquired after her favorite composer. She responded with some hesitancy, “Bach, I guess.”
When I went through my notes afterward, I realized that her hesitancy may have been annoyance. She’d already answered our question: “I’m often asked who my favorite composer is… [When I hesitate,] they say, ‘How about Bach?’ I kind of think that Bach is someone who can’t be put in that category anymore. It’s not about whether you like him or not; Bach’s music is something you have to face.”
We were talking about Bach because of the young virtuoso’s ambitious and long-term plan to perform all of Bach’s organ works. At the time of the interview, she’d already completed her first concert, a program put together by colleague Takumi Kato made up of Bach’s “Greatest Hits”—a familiar slate of his most famous works.
“Japanese people are very sincere, and if they are told that something is good, they think it is good,” Ohki continued.
If you ask any Japanese about famous organ music, I don’t think they’ll come up with Widor or Buxtehude. But if you start with Bach, they can be sure of it. I bet there’s no other country where Toccota and Fugue [in D-Minor, BWV 565] is played so often, and the Fugue in G-minor [BWV 578]. You can’t go wrong if you hear these!
When we ask her why she’s undertaken this Herculean task, there’s a kind of fatalism in her response.
Bach’s collected organ works were in my parents’ house; I think my mother bought them a long time ago. I used to listen to them when I was a kid. Since I was a student, I guess I had this vague sense that one day I would have to play all Bach’s organ pieces. Perhaps it’s because my teacher, [Yuichi] Shiina, was working very hard on such a project when I studied with him. I’m not really a Bach specialist, so I don’t think of this as my life’s work, but I definitely feel that Bach’s music is something that I will be dealing with for the rest of my life as an organist.
Something you have to face. Dealing with. Have to play. Better get it over with, then. When the pandemic hit and performances were indefinitely suspended, she thought, now’s the moment:
If I’m going to be an organist, I’m going to have to play all these things. It would have been better to start a little earlier, but I really wanted to see how my playing would change by studying Bach’s music. I wanted to see who I will become as an organist after I had done all of that. So I wanted to start as soon as possible, to leave some possibility for me to still play and study as an organist after that.
It’s a lot of work, playing through all of Bach’s repertoire. She started by imagining doing two concerts per year, an ambitious number now diminished to one: “There are many things that are very easy to play, but if you want to study each song properly, you have to spend a lot of time on it.”
We ask her how she feels when she performs.
Desperate! And that I’m totally awesome. It’s a feeling kind of like waiting for joy. I’m trying not to miss anything. The amount of information!
Playing through Bach is a kind of musical apprenticeship she’s been putting off.
Since high school, I’ve known that you can learn a lot from Bach’s music. I thought then, well, I can’t do this, so I practiced other things. Now when similar elements appear in someone else’s work, I enjoy seeing the connection between the elements. When I study Bach’s music, I discover a lot of things that I can’t do, things that I can do, things that I have to do like this… that, in fact, I didn’t have this technique down yet. It’s [a little] like reading a textbook or a reference book.
So is Bach still her favorite composer?
Of course I respect Bach, and I think he left a really great treasure behind. But if you ask me if that makes him my favorite composer, I would say that Bach transcends that question.
[Quotes are my own translation from the Japanese of our transcribed interview.]