The Face-Off

The Great Contest: Bach, Scarlatti, and Handel
David Yearsley plays the Op. 85 Fisk organ (1984) at Memorial Church, Stanford University
Loft Records LRCD-1028; 2002

***

This is an intriguing concept: a CD that mimics the dream concert of the 18th Century, a meeting between Domenico Scarlatti, George Frideric Handel and J.S. Bach. All were born in 1685 and died in the 1750s, and the three together represented the state of musical and keyboard arts of the day (by any objective measure, the year 1685 must count as one of music history's most momentous). Scarlatti and Handel did meet, I believe, and held a kind of contest; as I recall, the "decision" was said to go to Handel for the organ and Scarlatti for the keyboard. Very judicious. But neither man ever met Bach in person. This CD gives us a taste of what such a meeting might have sounded like. Or at least it stacks their compositions up side-by-side, even if we can't know how each man's performances might have illuminated his own works.

Scarlatti's sonatas are not often heard on organ, being conceived mostly for the harpsichord (though pianists often play them). They don't suffer at the organ, certainly, though the instrument puts Mr. Scarlatti at a bit of a disadvantage since this is not how we expect to hear his works. And it rather makes inevitable a direct comparison with Handel and Bach, both of whose works are much more commonly heard on the organ. But none of these three composers is painting with the same brush as the others, and hearing Scarlatti on the organ sandwiched by the other two kind of shines the wrong type of light on him.

And in this setting the great Handel sounds rather like a transitional figure toward the Next Big Thing. A bit more expansive, perhaps, than Mr. Scarlatti, and with his toe dipping in the galant. Handel has a wonderful fluidity, a pastoral beauty which is so often heard in his string writing. It's just a different aesthetic than Bach and Scarlatti.

But Bach is the party crasher here. That at any rate is how this little experiment sounds to me: Scarlatti and Handel give us delightful and engaging music, and Bach makes everyone else sound almost like a warmup act. To my ear he just overshadows everybody with his singular and towering musical genius. Part of it is a question of complexity, I guess. Handel's sounds are sparser--less dense, less wrought with detail--and Scarlatti seems at home with the small, finite statement. He is remarkably inventive--over 550 keyboard sonatas!--but it all exists within a very narrow sphere. But in Bach we find something altogether more expansive and beyond easy categorizing. His Duetto No. 1 BWV 802 from the Clavierübung III (an uncharacteristically spare piece for Bach) sounds like it might have come from Scarlatti's pen, but by the time we get a chorale prelude (Allein Gott in der Höh' sei Ehr', BWV 676) one senses the other two would have looked on in stunned awe. His Toccata, Adagio and Fugue (BWV 564) is in its own league entirely. He's like a helicopter landing in the town square in the 1700s.

David Yearsley teaches musicology and performance at Cornell University. He has chosen for this recording the very felicitous 1984 Fisk organ at Stanford University, a vibrant and thrilling-sounding instrument that puts its tones before us almost like a 3-D hologram. His tempi are lively and the performances felicitous and sprightly. (I see, as an aside, that Dr. Yearsley writes a regular column for the online political magazine Counterpunch. The two I happened to stumble upon seemed like thinly-veiled Obama-hatred pieces, though the rest seem to be writing about more general musical matters. In any case, the playing on our present disc is delightful.)

As is so often the case, this Fisk instrument also merits a bit of mention. Here's another instrument from the hallowed Gloucester shops that plays with temperament (this time a bit like Martin Pasi's great Op. 14 instrument from 2003 in the Cathedral of St. Cecilia in Omaha). From the Fisk website:

By means of five additional pipes in every octave, a large lever can switch the Werk, Ruckpositive, Seitenwerk, and Pedal divisions from a Renaissance fifth-comma meantone to a well-tempered tuning like those J. S. Bach knew. The Brustpositive and the Brustpedalia are fixed in meantone and offer two sub-semitones, or split sharps, per octave, D sharp/E flat and G sharp/A flat.

I love these experiments, first for their glorious sound and second for the mechanical daring and sheer, whimsical expense. It says something good about our species that we can prioritize a device like this one. No A/B comparison between temperaments is on offer on this disc, but the instrument is noticeably not equally-tempered.

The sound from Loft is superb.

An American in Berlin

Simone Dinnerstein
The Berlin Concert
Telarc, 80715
2008

Simone Dinnerstein is an American pianist who shot to prominence with a 2007 release of Bach's Goldberg Variations. Born and raised in New York (where she still resides), she studied under Peter Serkin at Julliard. With her first-release home run at age 35, it is not surprising to find a poised and mature artist tackling substantial pieces.

This present release is the follow up to that debut, a live recording from 11/22/07 at the Philharmonie in Berlin. In addition to her undisputed mastery of Bach, we are treated to a late Beethoven sonata, and the 12 Variations on a Bach Chorale by American composer Philip Lasser.

I discovered her on iTunes, and found a couple videos (from Telarc) on YouTube. I have to say that her manner at the keyboard (from video) is a bit off-putting to me, seeming a touch affected and theatrical in contrast to a pretty down-to-earth manner when speaking. But the proof is in the sound, and this recording shows Ms. Dinnerstein in a most flattering light.

Glenn Gould casts a long shadow, and it's difficult for me to listen to anyone's piano Bach and not compare their work with his. Gould was notorious for seeming to give equal treatment to each of Bach's contrapuntal lines, which makes for a challenge even for the listener. But there are a lot of ways to accomplish the task, and the great Bach pianists to follow Gould--András Schiff and Angela Hewitt come to mind--have found their own ways to do the works justice. Dinnerstein more readily invites comparisons to these latter two artists than to Gould. Her playing is pianistic; she does not attempt to imitate a harpsichord. But her technique is clean and confident, and one cannot but look forward to how she might tackle the Well-Tempered Clavier, say.

Philip Lasser's work is new to me, but it has the most auspicious foundation, Bach's haunting harmonisation of the Lutheran hymn Nimm von uns, Herr, du Treuer Gott, BWV 101, (a chorale tune also used by Mendelssohn in his Sixth Organ Sonata). It's clearly a contemporary work, but it stays comfortably tethered to the original tonality in a successful blend of the old and new. Dinnerstein plays it as though she wrote it herself.

The recording is fantastic. There is nary an audience sound, and the piano's image and the minute shadings and harmonic minglings are perfectly captured. Some of my favorite organ recordings are from Telarc, though they have been quiet for a while. It's great to see them back in the saddle so impressively.

Church Without Talking

Bach: Epiphany Mass
Gabrieli Consort & Players
Deutsche Grammophon ARCHIV Produktion, 457 631-2
1998

***

Looking back on the short tenure of this music blog, I find that the previously-reviewed recording by Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort & Players, The Road to Paradise, stands out as my favorite recording of the year (at least so far). The more I listen to it, the more deeply impressed I am: profoundly conceived, flawlessly executed, stunningly captured; this disc is a rare, rare treat.

Well, the ensemble have been together for quite a while--since 1982, to be exact--and I'm the one showing up late to the party. So there's quite a catalog of recordings to explore. I've chosen next the group's 1998 recreation of the musical portions of a Mass at the St. Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach was employed for the last half of his life. The intent here, it appears (there are no notes with the iTunes download), is to show Bach's purpose-made music in as close to the exact context as possible to what people would have experienced at the time. And as such, we find his composed mass included among some of his organ works, a cantata and a number of other pieces by other composers. All these disparate elements would have been skilfully integrated and managed to achieve the appropriate ecclesiastical experience (as it was judged at the time).

I am, I've often said, a stickler for precision and intonation, attributes present to the point of conspicuity in their Road to Paradise CD. Not surprisingly, the current disc proves that Dr. McCreesh and company did not suddenly stumble upon their skills just prior to that most recent recording. This one reminds me of the axiom that our elders were pounding into our heads when we were kids: through discipline comes freedom. By choosing ensemble members carefully and holding everyone to very exacting standards, the work produced blossoms before us as something more than the sum of its parts. This particular setting places our Bach and his work among that of other composers, most notably Johann Pachelbel, which, with the chants and other service-related details, gives us a sense of his modernity and his perfection of craft. It's a glorious and elevating experience.

I'm less disposed to respond to the efforts at replicating the church service per se, doubtless because the ecclesiastical functions and origin of this music are lost on me. So in that sense, this effort as a concept album doesn't hit its mark for me. That element of Bach's music, his piety, has never played a role in my love of his work. I'm taken with his miraculous mind, his singular genius for purely musical logic. There is all the mystery of the human experience right there.

Still, I would not grudge the believer their synergy with Bach's religious message, and McCreesh et al. have given us the best possible chance to find the wonder of this music, however we define it.

Two Recordings of Bach

Weimar Preludes and Fugues
Joan Lippincott, organ
Paul Fritts, University of Notre Dame, IN (2004)
Gothic Records G-49260 (2008)

• BWV #s 532, 534, 537, 539, 542, 543, 545

Preludes and Fugues
Joan Lippincott, organ
Paul Fritts, Pacific Lutheran University, WA (1999)
Gothic Records G-49202 (2002)

• BWV #s 541, 544, 546, 548, 572, 769

***

Joan Lippincott is the former head of the organ department at Westminster Choir College, where, along with the Curtis Institute, she undertook her own studies. She specializes in Bach, but has recorded a fairly broad repertoire. After a distinguished teaching career, she now makes her living as a concert organist.

These two recordings showcase Preludes and Fugues from two different periods of Bach's life: the youthful exuberance of his Weimar years, and the more polished weight of his Leipzig period. Care has been taken to select instruments appropriate to the resources which Bach had available when writing the pieces, in an effort to bring us as close as possible to the sound and spirit of Bach's creation. Both instruments are from the Tacoma, WA builder Paul Fritts and Company. For the Weimar disc Dr. Lippincott has chosen a well-developed two manual and pedal instrument from 2004, installed at the University of Notre Dame; and the Leipzig disc gets a larger (and much-recorded) three manual and pedal instrument from 1998 installed at Pacific University in Tacoma, WA in 1999. Both are beautiful, impressive instruments that give us the clear and vibrant, pure-organ sound representative of the state of organ building of Bach's day, and both are in sympathetic acoustics--the Notre Dame instrument particularly so.

Dr. Lippincott's interpretations remind me a bit of the late, great E. Power Biggs, in that they seem at their best like a spotlight trained on the score, a rare glimpse into the composer's brain. This is abstract music, written for the glory of its peculiar sound and for the joy of triumphing over the rules of counterpoint, and Dr. Lippincott has an obvious affinity for this repertoire. She finds the inspiration from within the pieces, rather than imposing it from without. On the whole, I think the CD of the Weimar pieces is the more successful of the two. The Notre Dame organ is not large (35 stops on two manuals and pedal) but the divisions are very well developed, and it produces an especially harmonious sound. The acoustic in the recital hall helps, being almost cathedral-like in its scope. Dr. Lippincott's performances here are spot-on, among the best of these pieces I've heard.

The other disc has some of my favorites of Bach's output, some really excellent pieces--BWV 572, 541 and 544 are among my most beloved music in any genre, and the Canonic Variations, BWV 769, come off especially well. The PLU organ (54 stops over three manuals and pedal) is similarly brilliant, another Fritts masterwork. But there are several rough edges among the selections, the occasional missed note and the like, and the disc doesn't hit its mark quite so squarely. The opening piece especially--the Piece d'orgue in G Major BWV 572--has several distracting moments. There is a rather glaringly misplayed pedal passage about halfway through, and a peculiarly absent-minded-sounding release before the final section. And in this piece particularly (though I must be careful not to declare an error something that merely grates on my personal tastes) my old nemesis flexible winding rears its head quite excessively. At times it sounds like a small child jumping rhythmically on the bellows.

(I feel a digression coming on.)

Looking at the CD's notes, I see that the Professor of Music and Organist Emeritus of Pacific Lutheran University (and contributor to the notes) is one David Dahl. It strikes me now that I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Dahl during a cross-country motorcycle trip I took in 1982. I rode into Eugene, OR and went in search of the shops of the organ builder John Brombaugh. Not finding anyone at the shop, I was pointed in the direction of a recent Brombaugh installation in town, and went to the church to look around. There I found an organ lesson in progress, a student working on the Adagio of Bach's Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major, BWV 564, taught by none other than (I presume) this same David Dahl. When the lesson ended, Dr. Dahl--whom I'd never met nor heard of--was very kind to talk with me for quite a while about the Brombaugh organ. One of the items we discussed was the organ's prominent flexible wind supply (the degree of flexibility of which, if memory serves, could be adjusted with a switch or drawknob), which Dr. Dahl was quite a proponent of. I remember he asked me to sing a note, and then he shoved back on my shoulder and we noted the quaver in my voice. His point was that music-making is a living thing, and we all react to what is going on around us. Sounds sensible enough, and (honestly grateful though I was for his time and attention) it wasn't until a couple hundred miles down the road that it struck me that we don't push each other around during a choir performance! The analogy just didn't really hold water for me, and it still doesn't; flexible winding, beyond a certain minimal point, just sounds like a wind-supply defect--a result perhaps of technical limitations from antiquity--that has been mistaken for something sonically beneficial.

But I've carped about that quite enough, I think. It hardly stands as much of an impediment to appreciating these performances. I think the glitches I note (if indeed they are glitches) would only attract the attention of the devotee, and they needn't deter anyone sampling these recordings. I see that Dr. Lippincott has most of the rest of Bach's output available on the Gothic label; I look forward to hearing more.

There are many excellent CDs of this repertoire, and these are worthy additions to the catalog. They showcase one of our country's great concert organists and some really great and artistic American organs. With my small reservations noted, I'm happy to add them to my collection.

200 Years' Worth

Preludes, Fugues and Variations
Music of Bach, Beethoven, Franck and Rachmaninov
Frederick Moyer, Piano
JRI Records, J101

• Bach/David Moyer: "Herr Christ, der ein'ge Gottes-Sohn"
• Beethoven: Twelve Variations on a Russian Dance
• Franck/Bauer: Prelude, Fugue et Variation in b minor
• Rachmaninoff: Three Preludes from Op. 23: No. 2 in B-flat Major, No. 4 in D Major, No. 5 in g minor
• Bach/Busoni: Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532

***

Here's a fun recording from concert pianist Frederick Moyer. He has collected a recital of various pieces which conform to the basic forms of Franck's triptych: preludes, fugues or variations. For the preludes, we get three piano preludes from Rachmaninov's Opus 23 set, a transcription of Bach's organ chorale prelude Herr Christ, der ein'ge Gottes-Sohn, BWV 601, and Busoni's transcription of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532; that piece gives us our fugue, along with Franck's Prelude, fugue et variation in b minor, which latter piece gives us a variation planform; this is followed by Beethoven's substantial Twelve Variations On a Russian Dance, WoO 71.

I confess I have too many recordings of both Ferrucio Busoni's transcriptions of Bach's organ works and of Rachmaninov's preludes as well. But there are relatively few transcriptions of Cesar Franck's organ works for piano, and this is the first I'm aware of that transcribes this particular piece. In any case this collection of pieces in a single recital makes an intriguing grouping, and a welcome addition to my collection.

The CD issues from the small, new-to-me label JRI Recordings, whose catalog exists almost entirely of recordings by this pianist. Regardless, the recording is excellent, quiet and fairly closely-miked. Mr. Moyer plays with a deft touch and a very deliberate manner. I did find a few of his phrasings a bit distracting, especially when the organ transcriptions essentially gave him more notes to play than he had fingers; his idiomatic interruption of melodic line to surmount these difficulties is expertly handled (that is, with the same confident deliberateness of the rest of the performances), but nonetheless seems always to catch me a bit off-guard.

Small potatoes. It's a fine performance of an interesting collection of pieces, well-recorded and played.

The Glories of YouTube

For those not familiar with Bach's Trio Sonatas for organ, they represent yet another milestone of organ composition from the German master. There are six Sonatas in all, each in three movements, and they involve (as the name implies) three musical lines in each movement: one for each of the hands and one for the feet. Registration is generally static, and the whole show is in the mastery of the dense, highly imitative counterpoint.

The feet are especially tasked here. Bach placed greater demands on the organist's feet than any composer to that point, and nowhere so much as in these pieces. The coordination required to play them at all is very impressive, and to play them well is really miraculous.

The organist, Aarnoud de Groen, is someone new to me, but he plays this movement brilliantly. (One small criticism: I do wish he had chosen a more assertive registration for his left hand, as this line gets lost a bit in this recording. But that bottom manual is for the rückpositiv, the "chair organ" which is speaking out into the church from behind his back. If this recording comes from the camera, we're hearing less of this--and more of the organ's mechanical sounds--than someone out in the church proper.)

A Body of Work

J. S. Bach: the Complete Organ Works
George Ritchie on American organs by Brombaugh, Fisk, Fritts, Taylor & Boody, Noack, Pasi, Yokota
(recorded June 1992-September 2003)
Raven Records, OAR-875

***

I probably don't need another complete Bach organ cycle for my collection. More than a quarter of my collection is Bach, and a majority of that is organ music, including at least four complete surveys plus several hundred other Bach organ discs. But apart from a piece here and there on the occasional recital disc, I've not bought any Bach organ stuff since the last of Wolfgang Rübsam's cycle on Naxos a decade ago. So it seemed not a bad idea to see what's going on present-day. Because I've listened so intently to Bach's compositions for so many years, and used them as a springboard onto other things, it's easy to forget how much of the musical bedrock in my mind springs from these works. And if I concentrate just a little, Bach's inventiveness and musical genius retain the capacity to overwhelm. He is just so fecund, so unfailingly and impossibly tasteful--the very loftiest stratum of genius. (It seems silly to even attempt to make a case for Bach, but such is his miraculous talent that I can't keep from evangelizing a bit.)

George Ritchie is Professor of Organ Emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and his releases for this series over the last decade or so have put him on the map as a specialist in this repertoire. A highly capable technician, he gives an inspired tour of Bach's varied output, from the tenderness of the chorale preludes to the intellectual challenges of the trio sonatas to the confident brio of the great Preludes and Fugues. Interpretively, Dr. Ritchie swings close to the center of the fairway, choosing middling tempi and wholly defensible phrasing and registrations. Any of these performances could be held up as an example of how the piece in question ought to be played, and if you didn't know this music, this would be a really excellent introduction. Come to think of it, Ritchie's playing reminds me a bit of E. Power Biggs's old recordings, but with a touch more period performance nuance. I guess that's a pretty lofty imprimatur.

The box set calls itself Bach's complete works for organ, but the collection is missing quite a few things. Only two of the Chorale Partitas are present, and the chorales from the Neumeister Collection are not here, just off the top of my head (my other complete releases have 17 discs; this one, only 11). I'm not sure if there's a scholarly reason for this, or whether further volumes were intended, but the six individual releases are boxed together for this issue and labeled "complete." Still, there's plenty to celebrate for the 200 or so tracks present.

I'm quite enthusiastic about Dr. Ritchie's choice of instruments for the cycle. There is little need nowadays to make a case for the merits of historically-informed organs, but this would be the set to do it. While Bach's gifts shine through almost any transcription to synthesizer or steel drum band or scat singing, the simple, direct organ sounds like those of the instruments he knew show him in the best possible light, especially compared to Bach on an American Classic organ. And in this set the artist has managed to hit all the high points of historically-inspired organ design (including a couple organs also used by Rübsam in his Naxos set), the builders collectively forming quite a who's who of mechanical-action builders in this country: C. B. Fisk, Paul Fritts, John Brombaugh, Taylor & Boody, Fritz Noack. And there are a couple I'd not heard of as well: Martin Pasi and Associates, and the Japanese-American builder Munetaka Yokota. It turns out that Mr. Yokota, whose organ in this present CD release is at the California State University in Chino, was responsible for building and voicing the pipes for the North German organ at GOArt, the Goteborg Organ Art Center in Sweden--an organ about which I have erupted with effusive praise. So, small world.

They're excellent organs all. I especially like Fritz Noack's 1995 instrument in Christ the King Evangelical Lutheran Church in Houston. The instrument seems to achieve a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts unity (though the extreme flexibility of the winding is occasionally disrupting; I've heard the arguments in favor of it, but it still sounds like a defect to me). Martin Pasi & Assoc.'s 2003 organ in the Cathedral of St. Cecilia in Omaha is also excellent, and new to me. It's a larger acoustic than one typically finds in this country. And the Op. 18 organ of Paul Fritts at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma (1998) has gotten a lot of attention. This is my first recording of that instrument as well.

Lastly, because of a small personal connection, I'm particularly interested in the organs of Fisk and of John Brombaugh. Mr. Brombaugh and I exchanged a couple letters in the early 80s discussing organ design; so I've had a small personal attachment to his work since that time (there is a lovely and noteworthy 1995 Brombaugh organ in the chapel at Lawrence University, a stone's throw from my house). For the present release, Ritchie plays the Clavierübung III (plus some miscellaneous pieces) on Brombaugh's Anton Heiller Memorial Organ from 1986, located at Southern College of 7th Day Adventists in Collegedale, Tennessee. It has a distinctive, baroque sound, with fairly thin and prominent upperwork and notably flexible wind. It is tuned (as I think all the organs in this set are) to a non-equal temperament, which gives a bit of piquancy to the sound, and a little bloom to the resolutions. Mr. Brombaugh did not build too many instruments before his retirement (as opposed to, say, Aeolian-Skinner), and it's fun to find another large instrument of his recorded.

I've also always followed the output of the C. B. Fisk firm, both because a distant acquaintance of mine works at the shop, and also because the firm have simply done some amazing and innovative things over the years. The Fisk organ on this recording, the four-manual organ at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, MN, is an instrument with which I have a little first-hand acquaintance.



I got an up-close look at the organ in the early 80s, back when it was quite newly-installed and the talk of the organ world. At the time of its installation, it was the largest mechanical action organ built in this country, and--I think--the largest organ the Fisk firm had built to that point. The organ clearly had fashionable neo-Baroque design details--non-equal temperament, mechanical key and stop action, Werkprinzip layout--and yet was tonally not fully on board with the aesthetic, having both German and French elements; an interesting hybrid, as it were. It's a spectacular-looking organ. I attended several church services in order to hear the instrument (no easy matter for me), and I remember attending a recital by the great French organist Marie-Claire Alain on this organ. (During the reception afterward, I asked her what she thought of the instrument. "Very heavy! Very heavy," she said. "Especially when coupled. It needs a Barker lever!") [addendum: I see now on the Fisk website that a "in 1992 a Kowalyshyn Servopneumatic lever was added to make key touch more sensitive when playing with the manuals coupled."] I remembered the acoustic being awfully dry and short, and this recording confirms my memory there. The organ builder Charles Hendrickson told me some years ago that he had wandered around the organ cases after installation and was surprised at how "opened up" all the pipework was; Fisk had gone all out to get volume out of the instrument. The fact that it did not completely overwhelm listeners was a testament to just how dead the room is. It's fun to hear this instrument again on a good recording, and to reacquaint myself with it. It's not the most interesting or successful organ in this set, but it's still a noteworthy and very musical achievement.

In summary, this is a first-rate set either for those looking to supplement their collection, or for those who would like to explore the state-of-the-art in Bach organ interpretation.

The Mother Road

Bach: Great Chorales of the Clavierübung III
Murray Forbes Somerville at the Harvard Flentrop
Raven Records, OAR-750

• Ten Chorale Preludes, BWV 669-671, 676, 678, 680, 682, 684, 686, 688
  
• Prelude and Fugue in E-flat, "St. Anne"

***

This instrument was made famous by the late concert organist E. Power Biggs, who recorded six volumes of Bach on it, plus Hindemith's organ sonatas and some Sweelinck and several others. Since Biggs' death in 1977, the instrument has been regularly played, but recorded much less frequently. The Harvard University Organist Murray Forbes Somerville recorded the Orgelbüchlein on it 20 years or so ago now, and organist John Ayer did a musical tribute to Biggs a few years back. On this present disc, recorded in 2000, Dr. Somerville finishes his tenure at Harvard by recording about half of the Third part of the Clavierübung.

I confess have a exaggerated soft spot for this particular organ, and I'm frankly surprised to learn there is a recording on it which I've somehow missed (I've scoured my CDs a couple times, convinced that this purchase was a duplicate, but so far I can't find it). Years ago I even made a pilgrimage to Boston specifically to see this organ, and I was able to get a private tour of the instrument and was allowed to spend a couple hours on my own poking around and playing it. When I was first discovering the organ--and discovering Bach--in the early 80s, Biggs' recordings were in record stores everywhere. The existence of this particular instrument in Harvard's Germanic Museum was Biggs' doing, with the organist doing the research, commissioning the builder, and even paying for the instrument out of his own pocket (he later donated the organ to the University, I believe). This instrument played a huge role in awakening America's sensibilities to the riches of organ history, and specifically to the real virtues of baroque organ design, principles from which contemporary organ design had diverged sharply.

This awakening to the merits of baroque and pre-baroque organs began a couple decades before this Flentrop was installed at Harvard in 1958, and in fact American builders, responding to this awakening, had begun to take small, tentative steps to incorporate some of the baroque tonal and mechanical principles into their modern instruments. The preceding organ in the Germanic Museum's loft--prior to Biggs' Flentrop--came from the firm of Aeolian-Skinner, and was an experiment with Biggs to try out some of these new theories. The organ was broadcast weekly on radio, and became quite famous in its own right. But this Aeolian-Skinner "baroque" instrument was a travesty compared to what Biggs had played and recorded in Europe, and he wanted much more. The story goes that the tonal directorship of Aeolian-Skinner was coming vacant, and Biggs wanted that position for himself, confident that he could help the firm, and the American organ industry as a whole, take a giant leap back to the future. When the position was denied him, the most famous and influential organist in the world went to a Dutch builder and commissioned the instrument which helped put Skinner, and most of the other builders of "American Classic" organs, out of business entirely.

That's the story, anyway. But the instrument is quite able to tell the salient parts of its own story, the rest of this business falling away and leaving only music. It's a fairly small organ--27 stops and 34 ranks over three manuals and pedal--but it's in a spectacularly live acoustic, and the organ speaks with an astounding clarity. It seems possible to identify the sound of each individual pipe, and yet the ensemble comes together from disparate individual sounds in a most unexpected way. Dirk Flentrop has given the organ a bright, present character which sounds vibrantly musical, moreso than any other organ I've ever heard. I'm accustomed to thinking that it's just my early exposure to the instrument which biases me toward this favoritism, but even after a couple years without listening to these old recordings I find my excitement quickly renewed to hear it again; it's really a magical convergence of circumstances which add up to a confident and compelling musical statement.



Dr. Somerville writes in the CD notes:

The pipes, voiced on low wind pressure and placed on the historic form of slider chests, have a gentle, alive quality of sound, and the open-toe, un-nicked voicing gives an articulate quality. This instrument was among the first examples (and for many years by far the most prominent) of the "Baroque" or historical organ revival; Flentrop subsequently installed many other instruments throughout the United States. Though it now appears to us more a product of its time in its neo-Baroque austerity (with no tremulant, no strings, pronounced chiff, and equal temperament) it remains a beautifully musical organ in an almost ideal acoustic location.

The playing and recording are both first-rate. This one gets put in my special pile.

Original Bach

J.S. Bach: Viola da gamba Sonatas, etc.
Aapo Hakkinen, harpsichord and Mikko Perkola, viola da gamba
Naxos records, 8.570210

• Three Sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord, BWV 1027-1029
• Two Trios, BWV 583 and 584
• Harpsichord Sonatas, BWV 963 and 967

***

The gambist on this Naxos release from late last year is Finnish baroque specialist and early music teacher Mikko Perkola. He is joined by the young Finnish harpsichordist Aapo Hakkinen, who teaches at the Helsinki Sibelius Academy, and is the Artistic Director of the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra and of the Early Music concert series at the Institut Finlandais in Paris.

These Viola da Gamba Sonatas are most often performed nowadays on 'cello and a modern grand piano, and while I came to be familiar with these pieces on that instrumental combination at the hands of Leonard Rose and Glenn Gould years ago, I find it to be different and more vital music when performed on the instruments Bach knew. For me it's not so much an authenticity thing--though I cast no aspersions on that goal, and at times I place my own premium on this priority; rather, I just find the character and tone of the viola da gamba aligns with something deeply in my musical sensitivities that the 'cello doesn't quite reach, despite it being my favorite voice of the modern string family. The vibrato-free steadiness and slightly nasal tone of the gamba seems to fully expose the artist, and the harpsichord's metallic timbre contrasts with the flatter tone of the viol, giving a richness and edge to the sound the breathes life into the works.

In addition to the more popular three Sonatas, the recording includes a couple less-well-known movements, the Trios BWV 583 and 584, which I know as solo organ pieces, and which are thought to date from around the same time as Bach's famous Trio Sonatas for organ (BWV 525-531). The recording also includes a couple pieces for solo harpsichord which I'm surprised to find are not in my collection--well, one not at all (BWV 967, considered a bit dubious) and the other (BWV 963) is on organ. So some new or substantially freshened repertoire is always a treat. The sonatas are all expertly played, with tempos and phrasing just perfect to my ear.

The recording, as always with Naxos, is excellent.

Fly-By-Wire Bach

Wendy Carlos:
Switched-on Boxed Set
--Switched-On Bach
--The Well-Tempered Synthesizer
--Switched-On Bach II
--Switched-On Brandenburgs

East Side Digital ESD 81422

Wendy Carlos's original Switched-On Bach (1968) was one of my first classical music enthusiasms. My parents had an 8-track player in our family room (shaped like an old-fashioned diver's helmet, except made of white plastic), and this was one of the releases that was send by default when they joined one of those get-a-thousand-releases-for-a-penny schemes. At first I just found it sonically interesting, a bunch of bleeps and bloops that were clearly rather painstakingly assembled. But over time the whole business came to seem a good deal more serious in intent. In addition to introducing people to the Moog Synthesizer, it brought Bach into a bunch more living rooms, which can't be a bad thing. Carlos never desired, I think, to lean more toward erudition than entertainment, but neither was it just some crackpot marketing scheme. On the strength of this release, I found myself increasingly interested in her subsequent releases.

A few years ago, a Minneapolis company, East Side Digital, released the original Bach- and Baroque-related releases in a lovely boxed set. In addition to re-mastered recordings, the box includes superb documentation and a bunch of extras--photos, interviews, sound files, web site access. I snatched it up immediately. (They have also re-released Carlos's other recordings.)



I think these recordings deserve to be better known today, no matter that the first Bach album was a million-seller in its day. Quite apart from dealing with really peerless repertoire, they chronicle a seminal moment in the history of electronic music, the arrival of sound synthesis as something worthy of serious consideration by the mainstream music-listening public. For lovers of pure sound and sound manipulation, these recordings are documents from the frontier of a new age.

Robert Moog developed his analog synthesizer a couple decades after the arrival on the scene of the Ondes-Martenot and the Theramin. Each of these instruments represents an attempt to bridge the new capabilities with established protocols (though the Theramin looked and sounded--still does--like something imported from another solar system; it is played by manipulation of electric fields around the instrument, accomplished by the musician moving the hands in a kind of combination of hand puppetry and thespian seizure practice. The resulting sound is pure Jetsons, or maybe Twilight Zone). The famous Hammond electric organ dates from the same pre-Moog period, and represented yet another attempt to bring electricity into the musical world, all of them together looking rather like Galapagos finches rushing to fill every little existential void.

Though Moog was originally a Theramin player and builder, his idea with the synthesizer was to control the envelope of a sound in every particular, thus enabling a player to create virtually any simple waveform. Controls were included for choice of basic wave form via an oscillator--square, sawtooth, sine or noise--and for manipulation of four basic parameters: attack, decay, sustain and release. To these controls were added various filters and the like, all routed and connected by patch cords like a WWII telephone operator. Pictures of Carlos's studios over the years are fabulously chaotic, and the idea of sophisticated music coming from this contraption seems unlikely. A little time spent with the Moog made clear to everyone that most sounds are much more complex than what could be produced via the simple waveform controls, but even for a first step it was a huge one.



This sound production technology was in its infancy here and was quickly evolving--something immediately evident with each new release by Carlos, where the sound became smoother and more controlled and the timbres more and more complex. But the means of recording these sounds was also in its infancy and experiencing rapid, symbiotic change. In the beginning, far from having digital recording and Pro Tools, there was not even stereo. The very concept of high fidelity sound--HiFi--was itself fairly new. While Robert Moog was busy trying to define and then extend the new keyboard instrument's capabilities, Wendy Carlos was working with him and also trying to figure out how to make complex music on what was simultaneously a futuristic and crude device. Carlos had to develop techniques for getting monodic lines from individual monaural recordings bounced together so as to sound like they were performed simultaneously, and so on and so on until one had orchestral-sounding music. The fact that the sounds were actually electric signals put directly onto tape makes everything very immediate--there is no intervening acoustical or capturing issues like one has with a live recording. There's nothing on the recording except what the artist specifically places there.

But even that was very limited. The early synthesizers had no touch sensitivity (though Moog came up with a rudimentary one quite quickly), and could play only one note at a time. People typically don't understand this: you could not play chords on the Moog synthesizer--everything had to be recorded one note at a time (so a simple triad took three passes with the tape recorder.) Thus, the number of passes required to put each track on these CDs in the can is deceptively high--a really tremendous amount of very painstaking work. From step one they were up against the limitations of all the machinery, and the first Switched-On Bach album (well, the later ones too) was a snapshot of the cutting edge of a quickly-expanding musical horizon.

My wife finds these sounds highly irritating, and indeed they are quite raw, especially on the first Switched-On Bach album. The controllable parameters were relatively few, and so the resulting sounds were very basic (like Carlos herself says: "salty, sweet, sour"). For all the newness on display, there is not a lot of subtlety. Intonation and timing represented real challenges, and one can sense just what mountain needed to be climbed to bring us the finished product. But there is an electricity (sorry) to these recordings, a sense of restrictions tumbling down and a thrilling cosmos opening in front of one. To know what the sound really is, and how it came to be, makes these recordings like peering into a forgotten black and white photograph.

But what really saves these recordings and seals their merit for posterity is the fundamental musicality of Wendy Carlos. Even while getting her hands dirty with all the technical gobbledygook (which stuff I happen to love), she never forgets the ultimate goal: to make music. The music of Bach, ever versatile and adaptable (which is proven beyond doubt here), is given a respectful and knowing treatment at the hands of this new technology. Well, mostly. The instrument is limited in its capacity for playing tender, expressive lines--you wouldn't use it to replace, say, a solo violin--but in payment for that sacrifice it offers great clarity, unlimited frequency range, and the ability to produce sounds never heard before. I don't know that I prefer any of these performances over my favorite recordings of the instruments Bach had in mind, but I've still listened to these synthesizer recordings an awful lot. And they hold up really well.

Bach On Ye Olde Hurdy-Gurdy

Bach: Alio Modo
Fretwork
Harmonia Mundi 907395

1. Pièce d'Orgue in G major BWV 572
2. Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein BWV 641
3. Prelude & Fugue XVI in G minor BWV 885
4. Passacaglia in C minor BWV 582
5. Kyrie, Gott Vater in Ewigkeit
6. Christe, aller Welt Trost
7. Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist BWV 671
8. Dies sind die heiligen zehen Gebot BWV 678
9. Dies sind die heiligen BWV 679
10. Prelude & Fugue XXII in A minor BWV 867
11. Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir BWV 686
12. Fugue in E-flat major, "St Anne" BWV 522.2
13. Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit BWV 668
14. Prelude & Fugue XI in F major BWV 880
15. Wir gläuben all an einen Gott BWV 680
16. Fugue IV in D minor BWV 849
17. Ricercar BWV 1079
18. Canon triplex BWV 1076

***

OK, not really a Hurdy-Gurdy. (But that's what I imagine a critic might say, like Thomas Beecham's quip about the harpsichord sounding like "two skeletons copulating on a tin roof.")

This 2005 CD is one of my very favorites from the last five years. Take a veteran and decorated period instrument ensemble, and match them up with select pieces from Bach's vast catalog of fabulous organ compositions, and the results are pure magic.

Fretwork are a London-based viol ensemble, a group of six regular members who specialize in baroque and pre-baroque repertoire. They've made numerous ensemble recordings and backed up soloists on several different music labels. I first encountered them with a recording a few years back of Bach's Art of Fugue and another of music of John Dowland. But this disc hits a home run for me repertoire-wise, with several pieces that are pointed favorites of mine: the c minor Passacaglia, the G Major Piece d'Orgue, and the organ chorale Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit (supposedly written on Bach's deathbed and devastating in its restrained, heartbreaking beauty).

These pieces would sound good on, say, a modern string sextet (hell, Bach sounds great on anything), but the viols are an especially auspicious setting. The viola da gamba family was very familiar to Bach, so it's not an inappropriate sound for baroque music. And the sound seems tailor-made for ensemble work, being rather nasal and quieter than its violin-family counterpart and with a particularly good ensemble blend. Standard period practice seems to dictate that vibrato is used sparingly, if at all; so the resulting sound is clear and very pure, and the emotional content of the music is restrained and cerebral. It's a similar sound to the pipe organ, at least to certain individual stops, but on a more intimate and individually-expressive scale. Even though an organist can allot a piece's parts among a pedal and a couple of keyboards, assigning each part to its own individual string instrument brings even greater clarity to the part-writing, laying Bach's ingenious counterpoint completely before one. The only thing better for comprehending Bach's architectural mind is the score itself.

While I've always believed there is a deep emotional content to Bach's music--and indeed some scores are manifestly emotional--it often seems to me that this emotional content is buried beneath an ecrypting technical layer, that some work is involved for the listener to get to it. This is why one often hears from the unfamiliar or uninitiated that Bach's music is "cold" or "mechanical;" they haven't done the work to get to the juicy marrow beneath. This recording brings us as close as possible to Bach's conception, and to that marrow. Whereas the organ often has a lot of church-related baggage to overcome with the non-organ-loving public, this disc presents some sublime music in a way that doesn't require this dissociative step from the listeners. The person who doesn't respond to this disc, I think, is just not going to like this repertoire, period.

I do have one little niggle: at times in these pieces, the ensemble seems to swell and diminish with no discernible (to me) rationale, almost as though some producer told them they needed to avoid monotony. It's a small thing, but if I can't grasp what contribution it's making to a musical idea, then the exercise is more distracting than anything. But it's but a tiny blotch (if indeed it is that) on an otherwise magical release.

Bach on the Lute: Paul O'Dette

BACH (J.S.). Lute Works, vol.I
Paul O'Dette
Harmonia Mundi
HMU907438

• Lute Suite in g minor, BWV 995 (transcribed from BWV 1011, Cello suite No. 5 in c minor)
• Violin Sonata No. 1 in g minor, BWV 1001
• Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006a

***
Noted lutenist Paul O'Dette has served as Professor of Lute and Director of Early Music at the Eastman School of Music in New York since 1976, and his discography encompasses a couple dozen recordings, including the complete works of John Dowland on five CDs.

This welcome CD features O'Dette playing music originally written by Bach for different instruments. Several of these Bach pieces, especially from the violin works, will be familiar to listeners from other versions: the Prelude to the third violin partita, for example, is more popularly know as the Sinfonia to Cantata BWV 29, and the fugue of the BWV 1001 Violin Sonata was famously recycled by Bach for the organ Prelude and Fugue (d minor, BWV 539).

This seems the right direction to transcribe the music of a long-dead composer: from (comparatively) simple to more complex. The limited polyphonic capabilities of the violin and cello for which these works were originally conceived make the pieces work very well on the more polyphonic lute, since the harmonic and contrapuntal structures were conceived for a more restrictive palette; nothing is lost in the translation. Transcribing Bach's organ works for lute (or, even moreso, for solo violin) would require leaving out so much that a wholly different piece would result.

As it is, these works come off really splendidly in the bargain, though they are a bit different than their originals. The sound of the lute, brilliantly recorded by Harmonia Mundi, is intimate and nuanced, and O'Dette lingers over details in the counterpoints and harmonic statements with a tastefully thoughtful rubato, and the effect is of having an eloquent spokesman for these pieces sitting before you in your living room. Again we find that there is no instrument on which Bach does not sound good, a testament to his versatility.

Though these transcriptions are not as genre-daring, I put this CD alongside the splendid disc of Bach organ works transcribed for viols released last year by Fretwork.

Highly recommended.