Haral Vogel

The grand Arp Schnitger organ in St. Jacobi (Church of St James) in Hamburg is remarkable in several respects. This instrument with four manuals boasts of the largest extant inventory of original pipes from thensixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the Trompete 16’ in the great organ is the very oldest of its kind. Harald Vogel, the Nestor of the Northern German organ tradition and the recent recipient of the Buxtehude Prize of the Hansa City of Lübeck, presents this magnificently restored organ in conjunction with an unusual Hamburg “family reunion”.

Buxtehude began his activity at St. Mary’s Church exactly 350 years ago, and the City of Lübeck fittingly commemorated this anniversary by awarding this year’s renowned Buxtehude Prize to organist Harald Vogel. Matched by no other musician, Vogel has distinguished himself both in historical organ playing in general and with Buxtehude’s oeuvre in particular. To celebrate this occasion, MDG is now releasing a highly interesting new edition containing all of Buxtehude’s works from the Codex E. B. of 1688 and including - as a surprising rarity - the recording premiere of a sonata with obbligato gamba.

One could hardly intuit from these fresh and flowing violin sonatas the obstacles their female composers had to face – family opposition for Mel Bonis in France and Ethel Smyth in England, professional bigotry for Elfrida Andrée in Sweden. It has taken a century and more for that initial prejudice to fall away, and they are now beginning to attract a fair hearing for their music. What ultimately matters, of course, is not whether composers are male or female but whether they write good music, and these three sonatas – melodically expansive, rhythmically vivacious, harmonically warm – point to the musical riches that further exploration of their creators’ output will uncover.