Sowerby - Organ Concerto - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Festival Musick and Classic Concerto were both written for E. Power Biggs, who had given the premiere of Sowerby's Organ Concerto in C major with the Boston Symphony in 1938. Festival Musick, written in a single week during the summer of 1953, was first heard on Riggs' weekly CBS radio broadcast from Harvard's Germanic Museum on 3 January 1954. The Classic Concerto had it's premiere on the same program on 9 April 1944, having been written in the first three months of the year. In both instances the instrumentalists were from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Richard Burgin conducted. Festival Musick is in three movements InchFanfareInch begins with a pungently dissonant but effective brass flourish. The organ enters with a toccata-like figuration in the right hand over a strongly angular theme in the left hand and pedals. After a reception of both motifs in another key, the movement elaborates on this material, progressing in excitement and intensity to a bold conclusion. After the unrestrained exuberance (and volume) of the first movement, the quiet InchChoraleInch is an effective foil. It is in variation form and relies largely upon the organ and one of two of the brasses used intermittently for solo lines of great beauty. The idea for the final movement came from Biggs. The A.G.O. (American Guild of Organists) awards two degrees on the basis of examinations Associate and Fellow (A.A.G.O.; F.A.G.O.). The three acronyms provide the major thematic content of a movement marked InchWith verveInch. While the A, G, and F are, of course, part of the musical scale, Sowerby's dual solution to the InchO' is ingenious. To reveal it here, however, would spoil the composer's little joke, so it will be left to the listener. If Festival Musick represents the composer at his brashest, Classic Concerto emphasizes his lifelong comfort in expressing his distinctive harmonic muse and fr

Bach was a central figure in the musical education of the prodigious young Mendelssohn, and he continued to expand the family's collection of the Leipzig master's organ music. However, he was also gifted at the art of improvisation, which is central to the organist's training, and he later wrote out several of his best improvisations as compositions for posterity. His organ music abounds in the elegance and impetuous vitality which characterize his music in general, while his lifelong immersion in the music of Bach is evident in both the counterpoint and the chorale movements to be found throughout his organ sonatas. Matthias Havinga plays three of the best-known of those sonatas on this album Op.65 Nos 3, 4 and 6. No.3 concludes in a lovely song without words, a style which he revisited for the Andante tranquillo of No.4. No.6, by contrast, opens with a magnificent set of variations upon the 'Our Father' chorale theme Vater unser in Himmelreich, elaborated with such mastery by Bach in the Clavierübung III. Three standalone movements include an energetic E minor fugue and a much more introverted, even melancholic F minor fugue (a cousin to the despairing F minor string quartet which became his last major composition). The Allegro in D minor begins in brilliant and pianistic fashion (perhaps also owing something to Bach's D major Prelude and Fugue BWV532) before seguing into a chorale and fugue. The arrangements are of the overture to his oratorio St Paul (transcribed by the English organist W.T. Best) and the Scherzo from his incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream, which translates surprisingly well to the organ. It is played here on the 1830 Bätz organ in the Koepelkerk in Amsterdam by Matthias Havinga.

2 CD 1 CD-ROM.