Tom Winpenny - Gardner: Complete Organ Music, Vol. 1 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Ahmad Jamal - Complete Live At The Spotlite Club 1958 [COMPACT DISCS] Rmst, With Book, Spain - Import date 05/25/2018

The organ music of Gerald Hendrie - born in England in 1935 but resident in France since 1996 - encompasses a huge range of influences, among them the organist-composers who went before him (not least Franck, Dupré and Messiaen), dodecaphony, mediaeval plainchant and modality and jazz. The resulting works are as varied as the styles that fed into them, from grandiose to gentle, from severe to whimsical, from lyrical to lively.

The Austrian composer Walter Bricht (1904-70) was one of many musicians of Jewish ancestry who fled Vienna after the Anschluss for the safety of the USA; Bricht became a valued professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Fittingly, it is the nearby Fort Wayne Philharmonic, in it's own debut recording, that has made the first album of Bricht's music. The recording reveals another major Viennese voice and points to yet another potentially important career cut off in the bud by the Nazis. Bricht was reportedly Franz Schmidt's favorite student, and the late-Romantic styles of the two men are indeed very closely aligned in their mix of Baroque counterpoint, Classical form and Wagnerian chromatic harmony Bricht's Symphony in A minor might almost be Schmidt's No. 5.