Garden Grove, Calif. ? The longtime conductor of the Crystal Cathedral Orchestra — a composer and arranger who worked with Celine Dion and John Tesh — shot himself to death at the soaring glass-and-steel church Friday after a nine-hour standoff that started just before a Christmas pageant was to begin.

Johnnie Carl, 57, got into argument Thursday evening with another employee, went back to his office and fired four shots, then barricaded himself in a bathroom and committed suicide as police officers tried to talk to him, authorities said.

Carl, conductor at the cathedral for nearly 30 years, had grappled with depression, authorities said.

The 128-foot-high church, designed in part by the architect Philip Johnson and completed in 1980, is home to the Rev. Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral Ministries and claims a congregation of more than 10,000. Carl directed the music on Schuller’s internationally televised “Hour of Power” broadcast from the cathedral.

Carl also arranged or recorded music for such artists as Dion, Tesh, Michael Crawford, the London Symphony and Lee Greenwood. He was an arranger and orchestrator on Tesh’s “Live from Red Rocks” and was an arranger on Dion’s Christmas special “These Are Special Times,” Schuller spokesman Michael Nason said.

Tesh said Carl was unusual in his ability to handle classical, choral and pop music.

Tesh said he believed Carl had taken on a number of projects and was under “a great deal of pressure.”

Nason said Carl, a married father of three, had last talked to him about his troubles about a year ago — “just a sense of personal pressures, job, and things around him, dealing with people around him.”