Organ Bach Sielbermann

The large-scale Bach Organ Landscapes project featuring J.S. Bach’s entire organ oeuvre recorded on a range of instruments aims to provide an overview of organ-playing and organ-building traditions that were key to Bach’s composing. With a keen eye to the unique cultural organ legacy of the places associated with Bach, Halubek has placed Bach’s original sound at the heart of his project. The recordings are accompanied by digital material that offer an almost tactile access to the great composer’s sound universe. This Album features famous organs of north Germany. Firstly, the organ by Friedrich Stellwagen in Lübeck. Secondly, the organ made by Christoph Treutmann in Grauhof near Goslar.

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.

Although we know of at least five concertos J.S. Bach wrote for solo organ we have no surviving Bach organ concertos with orchestral accompaniment. Contrast this with the 200+ cantatas: of these, 18 feature organ obbligato, which Bach uses as a solo instrument in arias, choral sections and sinfonias. The most obviously conspicuous date to 1726. In May to November of that year, Bach composed six cantatas which assign a prominent solo role to the organ. Most of these are reworkings of movements of lost violin and oboe concertos written in Bach’s time at Weimar and Köthen. Why Bach wrote such a number of obbligato organ cantatas in such a short period remains unknown.