His death was announced by the St. Albans International Organ Festival, which he founded in 1963.
Hurford made his name internationally by recording Bach’s complete organ works for Decca in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.
When the record industry was booming, such an encyclopedic endeavor was almost the norm for organists of stature. Many managed it once; a few, like Helmut Walcha, achieved it twice; Marie-Claire Alain somehow did it three times.
But while other organists might have had a loftier vision for this music, none played it on record with quite the commitment to authenticity and the all-around good sense of Hurford.
His playing was “characterized by brisk tempi, a strong sense of rhythm and highly articulated musical lines,” Thomas Trotter, organist of the city of Birmingham and St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster Abbey, wrote in an email. “At the time it was a breath of fresh air, and a revelation to hear the music of Bach dance.”
New York Times music critic John Rockwell wrote in 1983, when the Bach cycle was completed, that while “Mr. Hurford is not the flashiest or most eccentric of players,” his Bach was “deeply, eminently satisfying.”
Simplicity and clarity defined Hurford’s approach to the organ. And although he often played grander romantic works, he saw the century or so between the birth of Buxtehude in 1637 and the death of Bach in 1750 as the pinnacle of his instrument.
For a chapter on Bach in “Making Music on the Organ,” a handbook he published in 1988, Hurford took a verse from Keats that reflected his effective, straightforward approach: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Peter John Hurford was born Nov. 22, 1930, in Minehead, Somerset, England, the son of Hubert Hurford, a lawyer, and Gladys (James) Hurford. He trained under composer and organist Harold Darke and became an organ scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied music and law.
After military service and further study with French organist André Marchal, who inculcated in him a love of the Baroque, Hurford became organist at Holy Trinity Church, in Leamington Spa in central England. In 1958 he became organist and master of the music at St. Albans Cathedral, just north of London.
Firmly rooted in the tradition of English church music, and a composer of organ and choral pieces himself, Hurford remained at St. Albans until 1978 and oversaw the installation of a new organ there by English builder Harrison & Harrison.
Andrew Davis, the music director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago and a boyhood student of Hurford’s, recalled his “incomparable music-making, boyish charm and infectious enthusiasm,” especially during the construction of the organ in St. Albans.
“He was, every week, like a kid with a new toy,” Davis said in an email. “One day I remember ascending to the organ loft to find him grinning from ear to ear. ‘Go and stand by the Positive,’ he said, ‘the Crumhorn has arrived!’ ” Davis recounted, referring to a section of pipes and its new addition. “He played a chord on the new stop and almost blew my head off.”
In addition to the Bach project, which Hurford reprised by performing the works for BBC radio, he made solo recordings for Decca of composers, including César Franck, Felix Mendelssohn and Paul Hindemith. He also recorded Handel’s Organ Concertos with Joshua Rifkin and Saint-Saëns and Poulenc with Charles Dutoit.
In the early 1980s Hurford was visiting artist-in-residence at the Sydney Opera House, where he oversaw the completion of the organ in its concert hall. He served as president of the Royal College of Organists from 1980 to 1982 and was made an officer of Order of the British Empire in 1984.
In 1955 he married Patricia Matthews, who died in 2017. His survivors include a daughter, Heather; two sons, Michael and Richard; and nine grandchildren.
Hurford performed the works of Bach in a series of 15 concerts at the Edinburgh Festival in 1997. In an interview, he was asked what made Bach’s music so powerful.
“It’s his simultaneous mastery of technique and ability to convey what is deepest in his spirit in the music that he writes,” he replied. “The challenge is one of expressing this on an instrument which is arguably the most difficult to make music on — the organ.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.