Bach Organ Chorale

Thoroughly trained by his father Johann Sebastian, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach became renowned as a virtuoso harpsichordist and organist. His surviving organ music includes the seven choral preludes and ten fugues on this disc, which range from relatively simple settings to elaborate displays of counterpoint. Born in Rio de Janeiro and based in the USA, Julia Brown, who has made several acclaimed recordings of keyboard music by Buxtehude and Scheidemann for Naxos, has been praised as ‘a first-class artist and superb technician … an exceptionally sensitive stylist’.

The marvellous Ton Koopman plays Bach's complete works for organ in wonderful performances full of power, passion, and grace! These digital recordings were made in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, and 1999.

Masaaki Suzuki was an organist before he was a conductor, and his recordings of Bach's organ works have made a delightful coda to his magisterial survey of Bach cantatas with his Bach Collegium Japan. This selection, the second in a series appearing on the BIS label, gives a good idea of the gems available. You get a good mix of pieces, including a pair of Bach's Vivaldi transcriptions. Fans of Suzuki's cantata series will be pleased to note the similarities in his style between his conducting and his organ playing: there's a certain precise yet deliberate and lush quality common to both. And he has a real co-star here: the organ of the Kobe Shoin Women's University Chapel, built in 1983 by French maker Marc Garnier. The realizations of Bach's transcriptions of Vivaldi concertos fare especially well here, with a panoply of subtle colors in the organ. Sample the first movement of the Concerto in D minor, BWV 596, with its mellow yet transcendently mysterious tones in the string ripieni. BIS backs Suzuki up with marvelously clear engineering in the small Japanese chapel, and all in all, this is a Bach organ recording that stands out from the crowd. Highly recommended.

Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (Now come, Saviour of the Heathen) appears in three versions. The chorale on which it is based is Martin Luther's adaptation of the original Ambrosian hymn Veni Redemptor gentium. The first of these, for two manuals and pedals, opens with the first measures of the chorale theme in the tenor, imitated at once in the alto register, over a constantly moving pedal bass. The melody is then elaborated in the upper part to form an ornamented line.

The works collected and revised by Bach probably between 1744 and 1747 and included in the so-called Leipzig Autograph, the Leipziger Originalhandschrift, were largely composed between 1708 and 1717, the years spent in Weimar. The chorale, the congregational hymn of the German Protestant church, had its roots in pre-Reformation practices. Its importance in Lutheran church music may in some respects be compared with the importance in Catholic tradition of plainchant, itself a source for some chorale melodies. As in other fields of music, Bach's varied treatment of the chorale sums up and crowns a long tradition.

Born within a couple of years of each other, Gottfried Silbermann and Johann Sebastian Bach were acquainted, and we know that Silbermann in 1736 invited the composer to inaugurate the new organ that he had built in Dresden’s Frauenkirche. That instrument was destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945, but some thirty of Silbermann’s organs are still extant. From robust pedal stops providing a sturdy bass fundament to silvery flute stops, his instruments were famous for their distinctive&&& sound and contemporary sources often made use of a play on the name of their maker as they praised their ‘Silberklang’.

Old technology meets modern technology on this release from Germany's Oehms label, a top-notch Bach organ recording equally worth the consideration of the first-timer or those with large Bach collections. Featured is one of the monuments of central German organ-building, the Silbermann Organ at the Catholic Hofkirche in Dresden. The organ was dismantled during World War II but subsequently rebuilt and later thoroughly restored. It's a magnificent beast, with plenty of power and some unusual, highly evocative tone colors in the quieter registrations.

Before releasing his first disc of Bach’s organ works, Masaaki Suzuki had recorded the composer’s complete sacred cantatas, as well as the large-scale choral works and much of the music for harpsichord. His achievements in these fields obscured the fact that Suzuki originally trained as an organist, and began working as such already at the age of twelve. So when Volume 1 of this series reached reviewers around the world, it was something of a revelation to many: the disc went on to be named Choice of the Month in BBC Music Magazine, Diapason d’Or in Diapason and Recording of the Month in Gramophone, which then went on to include it on its list of the ‘50 Greatest Bach Recordings’.