A Definitive Statement

The Op. 31 Pieces en style libre of Louis Vierne
George C. Baker at the Cavaillé-Coll organ of St. Ouen, Rouen.
Solstice Records, SOCD 815/6, recorded 1993

***

I came to know of George Baker about 20 years ago as the producer of my favorite disc of Duruflé's organ works by Todd Wilson on the Delos label.

I noted the oddity at the time of the producer making a personal statement in the CD notes about how HE had hoped to make this very recording in his concert organist days before he abandoned his musical ambitions to concentrate on dermatology--not least because most of us have no idea (and could care less) what the hell a producer does on a classical music CD. So his little personal note seemed out of place. But, after all, he had interviewed Maurice Duruflé personally, and it seems as though Dr. Baker was responsible for the choice of the marvelous Schudi organ for the project. Anyway I remembered the note, and a decade later when I visited the instrument in Dallas I spoke with the church organist about that recording. "Do you ever see George Baker?" I asked. "Oh yes, he's here all the time!" was the reply. A couple years after that I found Dr. Baker acting as organist on a CD release of Vierne Pieces de fantaisie (a companion release to the present one) and shortly thereafter on a Naxos volume of Dupré. So I guess skin maladies were not able to restrain his passions after all.

Our current release was recorded on the magnificent Cavaillé-Coll instrument at St. Ouen in Rouen. I'm less familiar with the full set of Op. 31 Pieces en style libre, and do not find them quite as engaging on the whole as the later Pieces de fantaisie or the fantastic Symphonies (some of the selections from this set, though, have achieved standard-repertoire status). Still, I reserve the right to fall hard for them with repeated listenings. And we can only conclude that Dr. Baker returned to his organ passions none too soon, as his playing as brilliant: authentic, confident, passionate, knowing. If he's as good a dermatologist as he is an organist, then I can see why his choice has been so hard to make and / or keep.

And then there's that Cavaillé-Coll organ. It seems to be a toss-up as to which extant C-C takes the prize as the greatest of the Great Man's instruments, a contest between St. Ouen and St. Sulpice in Paris. Both are national treasures, and however you count the votes this organ is stunning, magnificent. It produces such bold, captivating sounds, and it gathers into a fearsome tutti that takes your breath away. It's immediately apparent to the listener that this organ is something quite beyond the norm. What a rare convergence of acoustic and builder--and, as it happened, composer. Vierne reigned over the organ loft in Notre Dame for 37 years, toiling at yet another of Cavaille-Coll's masterpieces (somewhat altered today, though still fabulous), and it bears repeating that his instruments greatly seeded and fertilized the great flowering of compositions from César Franck up thru Messiaen and Duruflé and on to the present occupants of Paris's organ lofts.

Every recording on this instrument is a treat, and this one is particularly excellent. And to have one of France's greatest organ composers on the menu, served up by a great and sympathetic artist, it just doesn't get better.

Another Buxtehude Cycle

Buxtehude: Organ Works, Volume 6
Julia Brown, organist
The Martin Pasi organ of St. Cecelia Cathedral, Omaha, NE
Naxos Records (follow link above to see track listing)

***

In looking through Naxos's recent CD releases, I see an ongoing Buxtehude series by organist Julia Brown, at least three volumes of which are recorded on the Martin Pasi organ in Omaha (their Op. 14) which captured my attention in George Ritchie's Bach cycle.

A quick listen on iTunes made for a very happy discovery. Although originally from Brazil, Dr. Brown currently holds the organist's bench at First United Methodist Church in Eugene, Oregon, and she earned her Master's and Doctorate at Northwestern University under the watchful eye of Wolfgang Rübsam. And his influence seems immediately apparent in her playing: she shares his vibrant but flexible sense of time (which always sounds more convincing with Buxtehude than with Bach to my ear), and her registrations and interpretations are confident and outspoken, at times even cocky; her confidence is exhilarating.

The organ is more interesting than I realized. From the Ritchie release, I knew the organ to have a non-equal temperament and mechanical action. But it seems the Pasi firm have gone considerably beyond that. From a bit of digging online, I learned that the instrument actually features two separate, selectable temperaments--making it like two organs in one. From the Pasi website:

The organ is comprised of 55-stops over three manuals and pedal, 29 of which are playable in two temperaments: 1/4-comma meantone and a new well-tempered tuning devised for this instrument by Kristian Wegscheider of Dresden, Germany.

This is the first I'd heard of the idea, but--of course--it seems that the shop of C.B. Fisk tried their hand at the same thing with their Op. 85 at the Memorial Church at Stanford University, Standford, CA. In both cases, extra pipes are included in the selected ranks, and, in the case of the Pasi organ, different stop-activation methods determine which pipes are engaged.

Again, from the Pasi website:

[29 of the organ's stops] ...contain eight extra notes per octave, tipping the scale of the concept from a single organ with extra pipes to the equivalent of two organs which share a third of their pipes. The abundance of extra pipes allows the circulating temperament to accommodate much of the Romantic and modern repertoires, while retaining enough key color to bring Baroque music alive and to lock into tune the mixtures and reeds in the best keys.

All stops in the Oberwerk and selected stops in the Hauptwerk and Pedal divisions are available in both temperaments. The well-tempered and meantone organs share the following notes in every octave: C, D, G and A. The desired temperament may be chosen independently in each division by the choice of stops. Each dual-tempered voice has two sliders and separate stop controls: traditional drawknobs for the well-tempered stops and Italian-style levers for the meantone stops.

I'm interested to know how limited the interaction between the "two organs" must be. Obviously, all 55 stops are available with the milder well-tempering. But presumably things played in meantone temperament are restricted to a much smaller 29 stops. Or can one mix and match? Maybe it depends on the key in which one is playing.

Regardless, the proof, as the saying goes, is in the pudding. The organ sounds wonderfully authentic and entirely of a piece (even if it's really of two pieces!). These performances hold their own with the excellent Hans Davidsson releases on the wonderful GOArt organ in Sweden (and, indeed, with Rübsams own Buxtehude cycle from 20 years ago). Given my enthusiasm for those releases, this is high praise indeed. It goes without saying that Naxos has given us a fantastic sounding disc.

I see that Dr. Brown also has three discs of Scheidemann on a Brombaugh organ in Eugene, OR. I'll sample those shortly.

A Bit of Recent Organ Archeology

Discoveries: Christopher Marks plays the Crouse Holtkamp
The 1950 Walter Holtkamp organ at Crouse College, Syracuse University
Raven Records OAR-790
Music of Bach, Dupré, Sowerby, Franz Tunder, David N. Johnson (1922-1987), Joseph Ahrens (1904-1999) and Nicolas Scherzinger (b. 1968)

***

With my recent review of Murray Forbes Somerville playing Bach on the Flentrop organ at Harvard University, I touched a bit upon the upheaval in the organ world that began in the early-mid 20th Century, as organists and listeners became aware of the merits of the organ of Bach's day. That Flentrop organ was one of the earliest instruments of modern times--certainly one of the most famous--to wholly embrace this organ reform movement. The principles of the movement included, among others:

• Mechanical key and stop action (the only electricity involved was to run the blower, and some of these neo-baroque organs even allowed for a manual winding option); this restricted how the organ could be laid out and how large it could practically be.
  
• The choirs of the organ were discretely organized into physical sections, and the sound of each was focused by its own case.
• Relatively low wind pressures were employed.
• Pipes were voiced differently, using an open toe and controlling pipe speech at the mouth of the pipe.
• Eventually, historic temperaments were regularly incorporated.
  

All of these things were a departure from how the organs of the time were constructed. A modern Aeolian-Skinner organ used considerably higher wind pressures, and the organ was thoroughly electrified. A modern organ console was basically a mass of electric switches, connected to the organ with an umbilical of electric cords, and could be placed anywhere; the organ pipes could be installed in any configuration--wherever the pipes could be made to fit--with the divisions of the organ mixed up together. In this scenario, casework becomes almost entirely cosmetic. (The one exception here would involve sections of the organ which were under expression--that is, inside a swell chamber where the volume escaping from the chamber could be controlled by a foot-pedal-activated wall of venetian shutters; these sections needed to be geographically contiguous.)

With early 20th Century organs designed to be a one-person orchestra (for playing orchestral transcriptions, say, or accompanying a silent film), many of the sounds were imitative of orchestral timbres, and the stoplists for these organs were very different from what Bach had been familiar with. It was against all this that the organ reform movement sought to rebel. The baroque organ had been a stand-alone instrument, one with its own repertoire and not predominantly imitative of anything except other organs. The rediscovery of these European organs reminded listeners that there was another way, and many found that other way to be more coherent and compelling.

This present CD introduces us to an intermediate stage along this retro-modernization movement. The organ, dating from 1950, comes from the Cleveland shops of Walter Holtkamp, and was a significant instrument in several respects. The Holtkamp Company was one of America's foremost organ builders in 1950, and Walter Holtkamp Sr. was one of the reform movement's leading proponents in this country.


This present instrument is significant both for its reform stoplist (combined with some of the previous organ's romantic pipework) and for Holtkamp's soon-to-be trademark use of totally open pipework. A portion of the organ is under expression, which of course requires some kind of containment casework; but most of the organ sits out in the open, the pipes themselves like a beautiful, sparkling sculpture, without any kind of casework above. The organ is installed in an alcove in the building, which might be expected to act like an oversized case, but subsequent Holtkamp organs were often installed completely in the open. Walter Holtkamp believed this made the sound of the organ more intimate and immediate, and it made for really striking and individual looking instruments. While the Crouse instrument has electric action, Holtkamp's son, Walter Holtkamp Jr., introduced mechanical action to the firm, and subsequent instruments have been a mixture of mechanical and electric action as the customers and circumstances demand.

While the instrument is not particularly baroque up next to the 1958 Flentrop (to say nothing of a present-day Fritts or Brombaugh organ), when viewed next to an Aeolian-Skinner of 1950 it's a pretty radical departure. And sonically it's clearly a step back toward this new way of thinking. And it makes for a compelling and very successful organ, one which does Bach with great unity and vibrancy, but also deftly handles more modern fare (which is always the challenge, isn't it? An instrument tailored for Buxtehude will struggle with Franck or Duruflé; compromises must be found).

Christopher Marks is Assistant Professor of organ at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. From 1999-2006 he taught organ and music theory at Syracuse University, where he became intimately familiar with this Holtkamp organ. As such, he has an affection for the instrument and an excellent sense of how to show it in the best possible light. In addition to Bach and Franz Tunder, Marks plays three pieces from Dupré's Suite Bretonne and the Passacaglia of Leo Sowerby, plus some excellent pieces from Joseph Ahrens and from past and present Syracuse faculty Nicolas Scherzinger and David N. Johnson. It's a wonderful recital of known and unknown, on a versatile and significant instrument.



Sonically, the disc is fine, though the acoustic--so typical in American recital halls--is a bit dry.

Take That, London!

Gretchaninov: Passion Week
Kansas City Chorale and Phoenix Bach Choir; Charles Bruffy
Caroline Markham, mezzo-soprano; Paul Davidson, tenor; Bryan Taylor, baritone
Chandos Records, CHSA 5044

***

I feel like some crow-eating is in order. Well, almost.

I've spent some ink extolling the virtues of London as a vocal music mecca (indeed, as a classical music mecca in general), what with recent discs of Stile Antico, Tenebrae and Polyphony--plus a recent Tallis Scholars release of Robert Byrd on the way.

But the world of music is always full of surprises, and here is an unexpectedly fabulous release from the combined ensembles of the Phoenix Bach Choir and the Kansas City Chorale doing the lush, lugubrious works of the Russian Alexander Gretchaninov (1864-1956). Apparently I'm still spending some time with my head under a rock somewhere, as this album was nominated for four Grammys including Best Classical Album and Best Choral Performance, and it won the Grammy for Best Engineered Classical Album.

Much in the mode of Rachmaninov, Gretchaninov's choral works are simple, direct and hauntingly beautiful. His harmonic palette is 19th Century, and his innovation is in expression rather than mechanism. Gretchaninov's Vespers resemble Rachmaninov's in exactly the same way as Duruflé's Requiem resembles Fauré's: they have structure and fundamental sensibility in common, but with a brief exposure you'll have no trouble determining which is which. My wife finds it all impossibly heavy, but it's achingly powerful to me. I think there's a strange phenomenon at work; if there were such thing as a soul, I would say this music is designed to crush the soul flat before giving it a miraculous healing. That's how this music sounds to me, almost like (to quote Shakespeare In Love) a sickness and its cure, together. I feel compelled to champion Gretchaninov, like a bout of Stockholm Syndrome. But really, if you like Rachmaninov's Vespers, you'll love this music. And this release is the unexpected equal in style and conviction of the fabulous 1999 Holst Singers release of some of the same repertoire on Hyperion.

I just never thought I'd be saying that about a choral group from Kansas City and Phoenix.

I suppose, to be fair, the London musical elite needn't put their flats up for rent and buy plane tickets for Missouri just yet. But it's an excellent reminder that there are sophisticated musical minds and really talented people all over the place. A quick perusal of the KCC's and PBCs websites show a group of mostly young, highly educated professionals (much like the members of London's Stile Antico, come to think of it). Well, it seems that they have several other recordings out as well, which I'm now eager to explore.

Enthusiastically recommended.

Where I Get Lost On My Way to the Review

Pas De Dieu - Music Sublime & Spirited
Janette Fishell, organ
C. B. Fisk, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Greenville NC, 2005
Loft Records, LRCD-1082

Music of Franck, Vierne, Ferko, Litaize, Duruflé

***

The organs of C. B. Fisk are disproportionately represented in my CD collection. Partly this is because, as I noted in an earlier post, I've had a little personal contact with one or two of the firm's organs; but it's also because the firm has been so consistently innovative and adventurous in its choices and projects. Charles Fisk was among the earliest contemporary American organ builders to construct historically-informed neo-baroque instruments--including an instrument for Wellesley College (Op. 72, 1982) that featured quarter-comma meantone tuning, mutant keyboard and all. But far from confining themselves to that niche, the firm have also done many conventional church organs, big American Classic concert organs (e.g. Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas) and even earnest copies of the work of French great Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (Oberlin College, OH), and everything in between.

This wide range is not an unprecedented situation in the organ world. Several other firms which pop readily to mind--Flentrop of Holland, Marcussen of Denmark and the Austrian firm Rieger, just to name a few--have also dabbled in this cross-genre business. But none to my knowledge have gone so far as Fisk, whose range is nearly all-encompassing. This is kind of a double-edged sword, as it makes the task more difficult to know exactly what the firm stands for; and more than this, it would seem to make actual boundary-stretching innovation (as opposed to just visiting the existing genres) more difficult, as the company is not singularly focused. (I don't know--is it possible to innovate in an historical genre? Is the blending of genres an innovation anymore?) I love all the things Fisk have done, from their most radical neo-baroque experiment to their fabulous concert hall organ in Dallas; maybe that's all that matters.

One unifying thing among all of Fisk's instruments is the use of mechanical key action. (For the uninitiated, this means that each key of each keyboard has a direct, mechanical linkage to the pallet which admits air to the pipes speaking that note.) From his start in the 60s, Charles Fisk's commitment to mechanical action was a pretty radical departure from the norm. I don't know that Fisk have never made an electric action organ, but clearly tracker action is one of their things, and this choice informs everything else about the instrument, from layout to wind pressures to voicing. While an organist's touch does not affect the actual tonal quality of the sound produced, there is still thought by many to be an artistic connection formed between player and instrument by the intimacy of this mechanism.

The advances of the Electric Age--fully electric key action among them--changed organ building profoundly, enabling organs to be built of almost unlimited size and layout. A single rank of pipes could be made to serve several purposes, e.g. as a manual rank at 16' pitch, and, with an extension, as a 32' rank on the pedal; likewise, a rank could serve as both foundation and mutation by simple manipulation of wiring. And indeed we see these things, as well as much-improved console assists for the organist--e.g. crescendo pedals and multi-level combination actions--on the organs of Hook & Hastings and Ernest Skinner and others.

With antique instruments, of course, some kind of mechanical linkage was required--there was no other option. But the march of technology enabled larger and larger instruments, until we get to the behemoths like the Wanamaker Grand Court organ or the instruments at West Point or Atlantic City, which would be impossible without electric key action. Between the two extremes we have intermediate steps; although the big Cavaillé-Colls in France were still necessarily built with mechanical key action, they have pneumatic Barker machines to assist with what is after all a great mechanical load--I guess this is technically "tracker-pneumatic" action. The higher wind pressures of an orchestral organ make opening the pallets more difficult, and coupling the manuals together simply requires more force than a person can deftly provide. (In the interest of historical authenticity, Fisk's Cavaillé-Coll imitation at Oberlin College has a similar servo-assisted mechanical action, even though this must be a more expensive and complicated method of construction on a big instrument.)

We could easily have a discussion about the merits of mechanical-versus-electric action--and I seem to have run off in that direction. For our present purposes I mean only to note that Fisk have stayed with mechanical action throughout their wide range of instrument genres--including those genres where we might not expect to see it--and it's interesting to contemplate what other things fall into place because of this fundamental choice. With an instrument like theirs at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, mechanical action is a bit unexpected, and so we find a modern synthesis of styles. Likewise the Lynn Dobson concert hall organ at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia (among several others I can think of). Here we have an instrument with both a mechanical action console at the organ's case, and also a remote, electric-action console down on the stage. These things all represent relatively new territory.



The new organ on this release, the shop's Op. 126 from 2005 in St Paul's Episcopal Church in Greenville, NC, continues with Fisk's commitment to mechanical action. And it also builds on their research into Aristide Cavaillé-Coll's work for the firm's organ at Oberlin College. The Greenville organ is unapologetically French, but it's a bit lighter in tone than Oberlin and it benefits from a more sympathetic acoustic than the one at Oberlin. The excellence of this NC acoustic leads me to wonder (again) whether the "French-ness" of the instrument is in any way reliant on the acoustic--and again how big a handicap the acoustic was to the firm's aims at Oberlin.

Whatever the cause, this Greenville organ is particularly successful, offering a rare blend and unity of sound in a spectacularly beautiful package. The Fisk firm have many organs in their oeuvre to be proud of, but this is certainly one where everything came together beautifully.

This release features Janette Fishell, Distinguished Professor of Music at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, where she heads the Organ Performance and Sacred Music degree programs and is Chair of Keyboard Studies. The CD includes selections by Louis Vierne and Gaston Litaize, the lovely Priére by Cesar Franck (one of my favorite organ works), plus Duruflé's Prelude, Adagio and Choral Variations on Veni Creator. We also find a premier of the Livre d'orgue of longtime Chicago area resident and organist Frank Ferko (b. 1950). It's an excellent repertoire to show off the instrument, and Dr. Fishell's performances are vibrant and spot-on.

In Bach's time, the pipe organ was the most complicated, sophisticated machine with which people had regular contact. Today, the actual inner workings of a Yamaha synthesizer or something from the Kurzweill shop probably trump that claim, to say nothing of all the complex non-musical things that are part of our everyday lives. But a pipe organ is still a daunting undertaking, an endeavor requiring expertise in metals and woodworking, in design and acoustics, and increasingly in electronics as well. It's a field with deep roots back into history, foundations which strongly inform the industry present-day. There is a delight in knowing that no two are exactly the same, and even instruments which are similar on paper can be widely different in the flesh. This makes a new instrument's success contingent on many different threads. And while all organs fascinate me just by virtue of what they are, it's still a special thrill to find one where things make that rare convergence, like the focusing of a light with a magnifying glass.

Based, admittedly, on only one recording (albeit an excellent one), I think Fisk have given us a keeper.

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.