Organist James Welch Performs at Salt Lake Tabernacle for Organ Virtuoso Performance Series

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By Christine Rappleye, Church News

James Welch has played on hundreds of musical organs around the world, including organs in Europe that Johann Sebastian Bach has played on during the composer’s 300th birthday celebration in East Germany; the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France; the organ in the Cadet Chapel in the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York; and more recently, the organ at BYU’s Jerusalem Center.

People have asked him, “What’s your favorite organ in the world to play?”

“I’ve played so many of the great organs of the world, it would be impossible to say,” is usually Welch’s response.

But he keeps coming back to the Salt Lake Tabernacle organ.

“There is no sound in the world like the Tabernacle organ. It has an iconic sound that is a combination of the company that built it … and the acoustics of the building,” said Welch, who is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Welch was the featured performer at a concert of the Tabernacle Organ Virtuoso Performance Series on Friday, February 7, at 7:30 p.m. in the Salt Lake Tabernacle in downtown Salt Lake City. It was livestreamed on TheTabernacleChoir.org and is available on the choir’s YouTube channel for on-demand viewing.

The Tabernacle Organ Virtuoso Performance Series started in 2022 and was created to showcase the Tabernacle organ — with its five manuals, or keyboards, and 206 ranks of organ pipes — and world-renowned organists and has been presented quarterly. This concert with Welch is the 12th in the series and first of 2025.

“I would never lie if I said the Tabernacle organ is my favorite organ,” Welch said in an interview with the Church News.

Finding a Career in Organ Teaching, Performance

Welch and four siblings all took piano lessons growing up in California. “I was blessed with excellent teachers and a mother who didn’t give up,” Welch recalled. He was about 10 when he got the bug to play the organ and would, with permission, sit near the organ on Sundays during sacrament meetings.

“I was so fascinated with it. I just wanted to watch,” he said. He had to wait until he was tall enough to reach the pedals to start taking organ lessons, which started when he was 11.

While he enjoyed playing the organ, he wasn’t sure of the available career paths. When he enrolled at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, he was studying chemistry on a pre-med track, but he also took organ classes. During that time, he went on a study abroad program to Salzburg, Austria, that included taking lessons and traveling around Europe playing on famous organs.

While serving a mission in Brazil, he found a few organs in various Catholic and Lutheran churches there and would ask if he could play them. After returning from his mission in the early 1970s, he decided to transfer to Stanford University, where several of his high school friends were attending. He continued his chemistry and pre-med studies while pursuing organ classes and had a “very inspiring” organ teacher, Herbert Nanney.

“I had a decision to make,” he said about his career path of either going into medicine or becoming an organist. He went to see Nanney, who wasn’t a member of the Church, and said, “I love doing organ, but I don’t know what a career in this is going to look like.”

Welch recalled Nanney’s response: “He looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you know why God has sent you to this earth? It’s to be an organist.‘”

Welch switched his major to music — and the course of his life.

After graduating from Stanford, Nanney recommended him for a teaching position at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and he taught there for 15 years. Later, he was part of the faculty at Santa Clara University. Throughout this time at both schools, he performed in concerts and recitals around the world, including throughout Europe and Asia, including in China and Taiwan. He has also played in Mexico and returned to Brazil.

Welch, who will be 75 this year, has also served in various musical capacities in his Latter-day Saint wards and also as the bishop of the Stanford YSA Ward.

Recently, he and his wife, Deanne Welch, returned from an assignment in Brazil — where he had served as a young missionary — helping to organize 45 performances with local members in the Sao Paulo Brazil Temple visitors’ center as part of the annual Vilazinha de Belem (Bethlehem Village, or Little Town of Bethlehem) leading up to Christmas. Deanne Welch arranged for the creche displays.

The Welches have two sons and now live in Provo.

Connections to the Tabernacle Organ

Welch’s organ teacher at Stanford had taken lessons from Tabernacle organist Alexander Schreiner, and Welch was able to take a series of private lessons from Schreiner at the Tabernacle. Also, while at Stanford, he got to know a fellow student named Craig Jessop, who was later music director of The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square.

Over the years, Welch has been a guest performer on the Tabernacle organ during the noon organ recitals, including one on his 40th birthday, when he played the same program that was played by one of the Tabernacle organists on the day Welch was born. At one point, Welch applied to be a Tabernacle organist.

Welch wrote the music to “Hymns” No. 138 “Bless Our Fast, We Pray” to words written by his former missionary companion, John Tanner.

Practice time on the Tabernacle organ is usually after the tours have concluded. It is “magical to be in there,” Welch said.

During the Organ Virtuoso Performance concert, Welch played Bach’s “Toccata in F Major” (not the one in D minor that’s popular at Halloween).

“It has two long pedal solos,” Welch said prior to the concert. “It’s fun to show off what the pedals can do.”

Also, with the position of the organ at the front of the Tabernacle that’s in view of the audience, people can see what he’s doing. “It’s a wonderful, fast, exciting piece.”

He’s also played pieces by California composers Dale Wood and Richard Purvis. Welch wrote the biographies of both organists.

The piece by Wood is an English folk song and “it’s perfect for the Tabernacle organ,” said Welch. Wood also would use the sounds of the organ stops, from strings and flutes to the clarinet and English horn.

Purvis was the organist at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, California, and Welch had some of his LP records as a teenager. “I got the sound of this Purvis organ music in my ear,” Welch said. It’s said that Purvis spent his career writing movie music for the Episcopal Church, Welch added. The music is “very orchestral, very dramatic.”

The program also included a symphony by French composer and organist Charles Widor, who was the organist at Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Widor wrote 10 symphonies for organ, and Welch played the five movements from No. 5. The toccata from No. 5 is commonly played on the organ, and many would likely recognize it, Welch said.

“It’s a glorious piece,” Welch said.

Welch said Schreiner studied with Widor, connecting his tutorial lineage. When Welch was taking lessons from Schreiner, this was one of the pieces they studied.

“How blessed I have been to have had these people in my way,” Welch said, emotion rising in his voice.

Previous Virtuoso Organ Performance Series Concerts

The series began in 2022 with concerts by James Higdon, an organist from the University of Kansas; Gabriele Terrone, the Cathedral of the Madeline’s organist and assistant director of music; and Andrew Unsworth, a Tabernacle organist since 2007.

In 2023, performers included Viktor Billa, Ukrainian organist and soloist who is an organist at Trinity United Methodist Church in Tallahassee, Florida; James O’Donnell, professor in the practice of organ at Yale School of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music in New Haven, Connecticut, who has had tenures at the Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral, both in London, England; Daniel Kerr, the chair of the Music Department at Brigham Young University–Idaho; and Brian Mathias, who has been a Tabernacle organist since 2018.

The first concert of 2024 featured Temple Square organist Linda Margetts in February. Organist Diane Meredith Belcher, who has been performing for 50 years, was featured in May. Seth Bott, who is a native of Castle Dale, Utah, and director of music and organist at St. James Episcopal Church in Midvale, Utah, performed in September. Victoria Shorokhova, who is pursuing a doctor of musical arts degree in organ performance at the University of Houston in Texas and is the organ scholar at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Houston, Texas, performed in November.

The concerts with Shorokova, Bott, Belcher, Margetts, Mathias, Kerr, O’Donnell, Billa, Unsworth and Terrone are available for on-demand viewing on the choir’s YouTube channel.

Playlists of organ music, including “Organ Solos” and “Tabernacle Choir Organ Performances,” are available on the Tabernacle Choir’s YouTube channel.

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