Jörg Halubek - 49°18'10.3"N 10°34'26.2"E (Bach Organ Landscapes / Ansbach) (2020)
FLAC tracks | 01:49:57 | 406 Mb
Genre: Classical / Label: Berlin Classics
The roots of the Franconian organ builder Johann Christoph Wiegleb are to be found in Thuringia. Surpassing even the achievements of Tobias Heinrich Gottfried Trost with his organs in Altenburg and Waltershausen, Wiegleb broke new ground with his great organ in Ansbach, now fully reconstructed (1738/2007). The abundance and fine differentiation of the foundation stops allow incredible combinations and prefigure the Romantic era with their wealth of tone colour; furthermore, Wiegleb built the first swell-box into a German organ. At about the same time in Leipzig, Bach was reworking eighteen chorale settings that he had composed much earlier. That is of course a coincidence – and yet an interesting example of how this fertile period of organ writing witnessed compositional ideas and soundscapes in a constant state of flux. Registrations were not noted down in Germany at the time, indicating an individual approach to organ sound. Joyous experimentation with colourful stop combinations is reported of Bach himself: in his Bach biography (Leipzig, 1802), Johann Nikolaus Forkel describes Bach’s “peculiar manner, with which he associated the different voices of the Organ with one another (…) It was so unusual, that many organ builders and organists were shocked, when they saw him choosing stops, (…) but were most amazed, when they later observed that the Organ sounded best just so, and had now acquired something strange and unaccustomed.”