The Cycle Is Now Complete

Buxtehude and the Schnitger Organ
Hans Davidsson
Loft Recordings, LRCD 1094-1096

***

Well, it took two years, but Loft Recordings has at last released the third and final volume of Hans Davidsson's complete survey of the organ works of Dietrich Buxtehude.

I was quite unbounded in my enthusiasm for the first two releases (here and here), and this three-disc set completes the series.

This release is again recorded on the magnificent GOArt organ at Göteborg University in Sweden. This instrument, which dates from 2000, was specifically constructed as a recreation of the state of the organ-building art for the late 17th Century, an instrument that would seem familiar and contemporary to Buxtehude himself. In addition to the appropriate acoustic--in terms of room size and material composition--the organ was designed and constructed with the limitations and preferences that existed at the time, including the use of quarter-comma meantone (of which a bit more is mentioned in my first review of this cycle, which happens to be of Volume Two). All of the glories and successes of the earlier releases are once again on display here, and this issue becomes a must-have if you've enjoyed the earlier releases.

The titles of the CDs give a subtle and specific focus to each release. The first release--Buxtehude and the Meantone Organ--emphasizes the revelation that awaits us to hear these compositions on a period-correct tuning scheme. This is no small task, as the employment of quarter-comma meantone requires a dedicated keyboard and pipe layout--indeed it fundamentally alters the entire instrument mechanically. But it's a sacrifice that yields an ample payoff, as this series readily demonstrates.

The second release--The Bach Connection--emphasizes the connection between the elder Buxtehude and the young Bach; the pieces give us a glimpse of what spurred Bach to make his famous trek to Lübeck in 1705/6. Buxtehude was the organ superstar of his day, and one can only imagine what Bach's fertile genius must have experienced in Buxtehude's presence (indeed, Bach was granted a two-week leave for the trek, but in the event was AWOL for four months. He returned to Arnstadt to find himself in very hot water indeed).

Now this third and final release shines light on the organ building genius of the time (and arguably one of the great geniuses of all time in this field), the German Arp Schnitger (1648-1719). Organ building reached a universally-acknowledged zenith under Schnitger (a convergence of music and instrument occurred at this time analogous to what was found in Paris two centuries later under Arisitide Cavaillé-Coll), and many of the principles he applied and perfected are still in use today. This GOArt organ is designed less as a direct copy of any specific Schnitger organ than as a faithful demonstration of the validity of his ideas in all facets.

I'm not quite knowledgeable enough about the pieces to know if the actual compositions were chosen for the theme of each CD release, or whether the CD titles are just intended to focus our attention on a different aspect of this convergence of talents and circumstances. But that magical convergence--of advanced and sophisticated musical language, brilliant composer and visionary organ builder--represented a rare nexus in musical history.

Here are three superb CD releases testifying to the fact.

Two More of Naxos's Buxtehude Cycle

Buxtehude: Organ Works, Volume 3
Wolfgang Rübsam, organ
John Brombaugh organ, Central Lutheran Church, Eugene OR (1976)
Naxos 8.555991



Buxtehude: Organ Works, Volume 4
Craig Cramer, organ
Paul Fritts organ, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma WA (1999)
Naxos 8.557195

***

Here are two more from Naxos's ongoing cycle of Buxtehude's organ works. I've been acquiring the discs rather in inverse order, starting with Julia Brown's fabulous later releases, Volumes 5-7, recorded on the magnificent Martin Pasi organ at St. Cecelia's Cathedral in Omaha. Now we have the two releases prior to Dr. Brown's involvement, Volumes 3 and 4, recorded by two different organists on yet two different organs. I'm always of two minds about this releasing of a composer's complete works played by several interpreters: on the one hand, it introduces a variable into the survey, which can be distracting to a new or fussy listener; but on the other, it ensures the whole cycle gets completed, and Naxos has been quite inspired in its choices. (Though for my money, I'd be very happy to have the whole cycle by Julia Brown on that Pasi organ!)

Volume 3 is from native German, and former teacher at Northwestern University outside Chicago, Wolfgang Rübsam. Mr Rübsam happens to have acted as producer for the other volumes in this set--as well as quite a number of other organ recordings from Naxos--and many of the performers on these discs have studied with him, including Julia Brown. Based on her glorious performances and a really excellent set of the six organ sonatas of Felix Mendelssohn by another student, one Stephen Tharp, Mr. Rübsam's involvement seems entirely welcome in any capacity. Rübsam himself released a complete Buxtehude cycle in the early '80s on the Bellaphon label, as well as Bach's complete organ output for Naxos (among many other releases).

His playing is characterized by extreme liveliness and virtuosity with a pointedly non-metronomic pulse. This makes for vibrant interpretations, reminding me at times of Glenn Gould, except that Rübsam is more concerned with authenticity than Gould was. Parts of his Bach are among my favorites, though often I feel aware of the artist as well as the composer, which is perhaps not to everyone's taste (in this he is like Gould or Horowitz; there are two geniuses in the room). But he's damn persuasive with his approach, and whatever I think going in he almost always wins me over. To my ear, his quite flexible time seems to work better with Buxtehude than with Bach, and this particular Buxtehude disc really comes alive under his touch.

His instrument of choice is a 1976 John Brombaugh instrument from Central Lutheran Church in Eugene, OR. It has a fairly mild non-equal temperament and makes a very appropriate and pleasing sound. This is really excellent Buxtehude.

Volume 4 comes from Craig Cramer, the Professor of Organ at Notre Dame University. As with Julia Brown, I fancy I hear some of Rübsam's irrepressibility and exuberance in Mr. Cramer's playing (the little devil sitting on the organist's shoulder saying "let yourself go a little!"), though perhaps turned down a notch or two. But if his approach is slightly less adventurous, this is still quite lively playing, and Mr. Cramer is solidly in control. His disc contains mostly chorale treatments, with a couple of Buxtehude's multipartite Preludes / Toccatas mixed in, and it's a wonderful disc.

The instrument is the 1998 Paul Fritts organ at Pacific Lutheran University, the same organ we've heard in George Ritchie's Bach cycle and the Joan Lippincott recording of Bach Preludes and Fugues (reviewed below). Again, it's a first-rate organ for the repertoire, and the recording quality is everything we've come to expect from Naxos.

Though their approaches are not precisely the same, they are both eminently worthy of the repertoire, and Naxos has done as good a job of pairing here as we have a right to expect. With Julia Brown's volumes, this shapes up as a cycle to have.

Another Buxtehude Cycle

Buxtehude: Organ Works, Volume 6
Julia Brown, organist
The Martin Pasi organ of St. Cecelia Cathedral, Omaha, NE
Naxos Records (follow link above to see track listing)

***

In looking through Naxos's recent CD releases, I see an ongoing Buxtehude series by organist Julia Brown, at least three volumes of which are recorded on the Martin Pasi organ in Omaha (their Op. 14) which captured my attention in George Ritchie's Bach cycle.

A quick listen on iTunes made for a very happy discovery. Although originally from Brazil, Dr. Brown currently holds the organist's bench at First United Methodist Church in Eugene, Oregon, and she earned her Master's and Doctorate at Northwestern University under the watchful eye of Wolfgang Rübsam. And his influence seems immediately apparent in her playing: she shares his vibrant but flexible sense of time (which always sounds more convincing with Buxtehude than with Bach to my ear), and her registrations and interpretations are confident and outspoken, at times even cocky; her confidence is exhilarating.

The organ is more interesting than I realized. From the Ritchie release, I knew the organ to have a non-equal temperament and mechanical action. But it seems the Pasi firm have gone considerably beyond that. From a bit of digging online, I learned that the instrument actually features two separate, selectable temperaments--making it like two organs in one. From the Pasi website:

The organ is comprised of 55-stops over three manuals and pedal, 29 of which are playable in two temperaments: 1/4-comma meantone and a new well-tempered tuning devised for this instrument by Kristian Wegscheider of Dresden, Germany.

This is the first I'd heard of the idea, but--of course--it seems that the shop of C.B. Fisk tried their hand at the same thing with their Op. 85 at the Memorial Church at Stanford University, Standford, CA. In both cases, extra pipes are included in the selected ranks, and, in the case of the Pasi organ, different stop-activation methods determine which pipes are engaged.

Again, from the Pasi website:

[29 of the organ's stops] ...contain eight extra notes per octave, tipping the scale of the concept from a single organ with extra pipes to the equivalent of two organs which share a third of their pipes. The abundance of extra pipes allows the circulating temperament to accommodate much of the Romantic and modern repertoires, while retaining enough key color to bring Baroque music alive and to lock into tune the mixtures and reeds in the best keys.

All stops in the Oberwerk and selected stops in the Hauptwerk and Pedal divisions are available in both temperaments. The well-tempered and meantone organs share the following notes in every octave: C, D, G and A. The desired temperament may be chosen independently in each division by the choice of stops. Each dual-tempered voice has two sliders and separate stop controls: traditional drawknobs for the well-tempered stops and Italian-style levers for the meantone stops.

I'm interested to know how limited the interaction between the "two organs" must be. Obviously, all 55 stops are available with the milder well-tempering. But presumably things played in meantone temperament are restricted to a much smaller 29 stops. Or can one mix and match? Maybe it depends on the key in which one is playing.

Regardless, the proof, as the saying goes, is in the pudding. The organ sounds wonderfully authentic and entirely of a piece (even if it's really of two pieces!). These performances hold their own with the excellent Hans Davidsson releases on the wonderful GOArt organ in Sweden (and, indeed, with Rübsams own Buxtehude cycle from 20 years ago). Given my enthusiasm for those releases, this is high praise indeed. It goes without saying that Naxos has given us a fantastic sounding disc.

I see that Dr. Brown also has three discs of Scheidemann on a Brombaugh organ in Eugene, OR. I'll sample those shortly.

Buxtehude, Volume One

Dieterich Buxtehude and the Mean-Tone Organ, Volume 1
Hans Davidsson, organ
The GOArt North German organ, Goteborg University, Goteborg, Sweden
Loft Recordings LRCD 1054

***

My first exposure to Hans Davidsson's projected complete Buxtehude cycle on this fabulous GOArt instrument (Volume 2, here) was a paradigm shift for me, one of those rare moments where something old and familiar is shown in a really new light. Having our eyes and ears thus opened to this new world, here's a further opportunity to wander around and absorb the newness of the old, and to continue our recalibration of Buxtehude's work. As with the other volume, this release mixes shorter, chorale-based works with more freestyle Praeludia and Toccatas.

(The extra notes required by quarter comma meantone are visible in this picture.)

The CD booklet is a bit more complete than that of Volume 2 (though still, rather frustratingly, devoid of a stoplist) and all these GOArt CDs are very generously allotted--this two-disc set runs to just shy of three hours total length spread over 35 tracks. I find myself more drawn to Dr. Davidsson's interpretations than I felt at first listening. My initial impression was that he was a mite stayed or lacking in energy; but given my penchant for things not being rushed, I'm coming to think he's on exactly the right interpretive track.

And again, the real star here is this magnificent organ, which the generous program lets Davidsson explore fully. The individual characters of the stops and different key signatures within quarter comma meantone tuning make for a larger and more diverse tonal world than we experience with the familiar equal temperament. Any given piece might be played in several different keys (and some exist in Buxtehude's hand in more than one), resulting, really, in several different pieces--the sonic character can be that different.


The acoustic is excellent for organ music--reverberant, but not stone-cathedral big--and the sound-capturing of the recording is first-rate. I eagerly look forward to the coming releases in the cycle, and indeed anything recorded on this instrument.

One Mean Instrument

Dieterich Buxtehude: The Bach Perspective
Volume 2, Complete Organ Works
Hans Davidsson, Organ
Loft Recordings, LRCD 1092-1093

***

I've been unusually immersed in organbuilding philosophy lately. As detailed below, I've just finished Dorothy J. Holden's biography of Ernest M. Skinner, and now have run across this revelatory recording of an instrument (and its repertoire) that couldn't be much further from Skinner's idea and aesthetics.

Loft Recordings is releasing a complete issue of the organ music of Dieterich Buxtehude played on a recent instrument built as an authentic replica of what Buxtehude himself would have known. The organ on these recordings dates from 2000 and is the work of GOArt, the Göteborg Organ Art Center, which is a branch of the Göteborg University in Sweden. I ran across the CD--volume 2 of the ongoing series--at my old favorite music store in St. Paul, and it was the first I'd heard of the instrument or the recording series.

The instrument (which, in an unusual tactic, is described in detail not in the CD release notes but here on the recording label's website and here at the school's) is distinguished by both its design, which is faithful to every particular of period mechanism and physical and tonal construction, and also by its tuning. The organ is tuned to quarter comma meantone, which is quite uncommon today but was a standard tuning five hundred years ago. (I made a very basic exploration of the concept of temperaments a couple years ago in this post.) This method of tuning, like all temperaments, allows certain keys to be pure, or closer to pure, in exchange for the tuning errors being lumped into other keys, which then become progressively unusable. Implementing quarter comma meantone on an organ is not so simple as tuning the octave just so; rather, in order to have the popular keys reasonably in tune, enough other keys are affected that extra notes are added to each octave to help salvage the damaged keys. (So you would have, say, two different e flats to choose from, depending on which key you were playing in.) Sounds simple enough, but with an organ the extra notes means extra keys (which look like a standard keyboard mutated by radiation exposure) and extra pipes and all the mechanisms that feed them.

Well, things sound very different this way. I'm familiar with all of Buxtehude's organ output, and some of these pieces almost sound like different compositions. I love that equal temperament--which is in ubiquitous use today--was known in Bach's day but was rejected since it left NO key properly in tune, and this was deemed unacceptable. Partly this was so because nobody ever bothered to write for the key of g flat (so why not make some other key sound better at g flat's expense?), but it must also have been the case that their ears were attuned to much finer nuances than ours. As I've played the disc for several friends, some can hear something amiss and others can't. To my ear, the "off" notes sound really off, and (the whole point of the exercise) the "in" stuff sounds fabulously, gloriously IN. The end-of-piece resolutions take your breath away with their solid magnificence. I can very easily see that the inability of an instrument to do this would make for a bit of a blight.

The organist on this recording is Hans Davidsson, Professor of Organ at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, and the general artistic and research director of GOArt in Göteborg. He is a specialist in historical performance practice and instrument building, and is an excellent advocate for this repertoire. His tempi are on the stately side, and he plays without a great deal of animation and electricity. This is excellent for elucidating the structure of the music and the beauty of the organ's sounds--and I am sympathetic to this approach generally--but at times Buxtehude's great multi-part Praeludia could use a touch more dash; he was, after all, the scintillating virtuoso of his day.

But if there's a criticism there, it's a small one. The use of quarter comma meantone allows the personality of these pieces to burst forth in a most unexpected way. Buxtehude's harmonic interplay takes on a very different and more inventive aspect when the individual keys have such distinct personalities. Dr. Davidsson grasps the totality of the statement which the package is making--again, a statement which might be rather new to many ears--and he makes a compelling case.

Seeing these two philosophies side by side--Ernest M. Skinner's orchestral American Classic and the North German instrument of the 17th Century--puts before you the very basic question of what an organ even is. What Ernest M. Skinner envisioned is a world away from what GOArt have created, and it's fair to ask whether they are both valid approaches. I love the American Classic for some things--for the huge sound, for the mechanical exuberance of the Machine Age, for the lushness and variety--but not for others. I think an organ without upperwork is almost a completely different instrument, and I think the period where organists played orchestral transcriptions (and thus needed orchestral imitation stops) was mercifully short. The GOArt instrument is not versatile. It does not acknowledge anything that's happened since 1700--Franck and Widor and Vierne and Leo Sowerby and Hindemith and so much more. But it brings the best of its own day to us so vividly that it's almost like going back in a time machine. It does this in a way that a modern instrument misses, in a way that validates the difficulty and expense of the exercise. We're reminded that the great musical minds of the day were not lesser than our own, and we get a little taste of the excitement that the genius Buxtehude offered to his public.

A really cool idea, an excellent recording, and great repertoire expertly played.

From Deep Within The Baroque

Buxtehude: Seven Trio Sonatas Op. 2
Naxos 8.557249
John Holloway, Violin / Jaap ter Linden, Viola da gamba / Lars Ulrik Mortensen, Harpsichord

(Recorded in February and September of 1994, re-released in 2005)

***

Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707) is known to non-organists as a predecessor and mentor of J.S. Bach. To organists, Buxtehude sits next to Bach as one of the instrument's greatest composers. In 1705, when Bach was not yet 20 and Buxtehude only a couple years from his death, Bach made the trek from Arnstadt to Lubeck to observe and study with Buxtehude. He intended to be away from his post for two weeks, but ended up being so enthralled by what he found in Lubeck that he stayed away for three months, returning (as we might expect) to a hornet's nest of disapproval from his employer.

Buxtehude's organ compositions are the embodiment of the so-called stylus phantasticus, a style that alternated extroverted virtuosic passages with quieter, meditative writing. Themes were introduced and developed and then discarded, often several themes in each piece. His multi-part toccatas were a model for J.S. Bach, but Bach typically did his own thing with this newfound knowledge. Though Bach stands now as the end of a musical era, in his youth he was already moving beyond his teachers, and we can hear the progression. To our present-day ears Buxtehude still has a touch of the antique about his writing while Bach seems musically completely modern. Still, Buxtehude was the brightest light of his day, and referring to him now as "Bach Lite" is utterly incorrect. Many of his chorale treatments for organ are at least the equal to most of Bach's similar output.

If Buxtehude is not universally known for his organ works, his other compositions--operas and cantatas, music for voice, and harpsichord works--are practically unknown. There are a few chamber works as well, and it is this genre which the present disc explores, seven trio sonatas, Op. 2, scored for violin, viola da gamba and harpsichord.

Even being quite familiar with Buxtehude's organ compositions, I confess I do not hear Buxtehude's voice in this chamber music. It's all quite pleasant and reminds me of Pachelbel or some Locatelli chamber works I have, but I wouldn't have pegged it as Buxtehude. Because I don't listen to a great deal of chamber music, maybe it's my ear that's lacking; but this music lacks the stamp of individuality which Buxtehude's organ music has in spades. There is a courtly aspect to these pieces, a sense of high-class leisure and of educated musicians experimenting with what were then the latest sounds.

The music is expertly played here on period instruments, and as always Naxos gives us an exemplary recording: they capture the room well, and provide a virtually silent background.