This album of contemporary organ repertoire features fascinating works that display a wide array of influences. Barry Jordan’s Praise Song, heard here its 2018 revision, draws on modern worship songs and African drumming rhythms, an element that also suffuses part of Thierry Escaich’s Évocation II, a work of electrifying intensity and vibrant color. Arvo Pärt’s starkly beautiful Annum per annum is featured alongside Theo Brandmüller’s last work Sternenklänge. Dialogue vers les étoiles by Christian von Blohn – a student of Brandmüller – acts as a moving posthumous dialogue with his teacher.

Vincenzo Petrali (1830-1889) was an organist-composer active in the north of Italy. Acclaimed in his own time as a master improviser, the equal in this regard to French contemporaries such as Guilmant and Widor, he left a small, beautifully crafted body of original work for ecclesiastical use, around a third of it presented on this new album. He wrote two organ Masses in the tradition of 17th-century Venetian school composers such as Merula and Merulo, in which each verse of the text and its associated Gregorian chant inspires an instrumental meditation: Paolo Bottini has recorded the lesser-known F major Mass, which includes an especially dramatic, march-like Sonata for the Offertory and an ebullient final Allegro festoso. He belonged to the Cecilian movement, exemplified by the sacred works of Mendelssohn, which sought to establish a new and distinctive idiom for church composition, which is heard to best effect in a quartet of Communion pieces at the end of the first album, which fully exploit the size and array of tone-colors available to him on the newly built instruments of the time. In this spirit Petrali also composed 71 studies ‘for the modern organ’, collected in two volumes, and Paolo Bottini presents almost half of them on album 2. While composed with didactic purposes in mind, training pedal technique, introspection or melancholy but often rhythmic precision, sensitivity and imagination in handling different registers and stops and the like, the studies are delightful character pieces in their own right, not much given to surprisingly sunny in character.

Livre du Saint-Sacrement (The Book of the Blessed Sacrament) is Messiaen’s last and longest organ work, a thematic cycle based on the sacrament of Communion comprising eighteen movements, many based on his recorded improvisations, arranged into three thematic groups. Hailed for his prodigious technique, vivid interpretive imagination and charismatic showmanship, Paul Jacobs is widely acknowledged for reinvigorating the American organ scene with a fresh performance style and ‘an unbridled joy of music-making’ (Baltimore Sun). He has performed the complete organ works of Olivier Messiaen in nine-hour marathons in eight American cities.

'From the New World' is the subtitle of Dvorak's famous Symphony No. 9, implying a departure into a new musical world and representing a bridge between the European and American music traditions and their influences. Dvorak's music shares the programme with works by Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland. These new organ transcriptions are performed by Hansjörg Albrecht on the Organ system (large organ, concert organ, echo organ) of the main church St. Michaelis in Hamburg. Hansjörg Albrecht is – besides Ton Koopman, Masaaki Suzuki, Martin Haselböck and Wayne Marshall – one of the few artists who are regularly present internationally both as conductor and concert organist. He is considered a musical innovator and lateral thinker without fear of contact. As a conductor, he consistently follows his own paths – between archive and new creation and with an extensive repertoire from Bach to Messiaen – and with his organ transcriptions he has established himself as a specialist among the virtuosos of his instrument.

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Pride of place here are the two arguably greatest works written by a European on American soil and an American on European soil. However, these are preceded by two remarkable transcriptions. First comes a boisterous version of Dvorák’s Carnival overture, made by another European emigrant to America, Edwin Lemare, which shows off Albrecht’s virtuosity. Then comes John Fesperman’s transcription of Copland’s Passacaglia, which gives us a fabulous Cook’s tour of many of the organ’s weirder and more wonderful sounds.

Barber’s Adagio for Strings works very well in this transcription by William Strickland; and while the bulk of the sound is, naturally enough, created by the string tone, Albrecht’s judicious employment of flutes gives it a comfortable, idiomatic feel. My only reservation is the bulky pedal stop which anchors it rather too solidly.

The transcription of Dvorák’s Ninth Symphony is by Zsigmond Szathmáry, and makes considerable demands on both the organ and the player. The generous acoustic of St Michael’s Church, Hamburg, possibly covers a multitude of sins, and perhaps some intricate detail gets lost in this highly atmospheric recording, but Albrecht has a powerful vision for the work and is superb in recreating what are distinctly orchestral textures. He is particularly impressive in conveying the dancelike vigour of the final movement. Above all, he moves across the mindboggling specification of this organ (by my reckoning, there are some 150 stops to play with) with the fluidity of the River Elbe.

-- Gramophone

This anthology presented by the organist Margherita Sciddurlo is performed on the precious historical instrument: the Petrus De’ Simone 1747 organ of the Church of San'Antonio in Mola di Bari, fully preserved and in excellent condition. The organ in question becomes the medium to reviving a cross-section of the Apulian organ tradition whose roots are deeply connected to the musical activity of the Kingdom of Naples since the 16th century, when thousands of young talents came to the capital to undertake musical studies that ensured them a secure career. Puglia turned out to be a privileged territory where one could later exercise the profession, sponsored by the numerous feudal lords or by churches, musical chapels and convents. From Rocco Rodio from Bari to Giovanni Paisiello from Taranto, through to Nicola Porpora and Niccolò Jommelli, famous allover Europe thanks to bright careers abroad. The collection presented by Margherita Sciddurlo represents a pleasant organ cameo which also includes some world premiere recordings.

The pieces recorded in this release stem from an all-pervading performance practice that deeply marked out the musical taste of the nineteenth century: that of “transcription”. This practice enabled a widespread dissemination of the most popular opera passages, well beyond the official circuits of the great theatres, and above all into the sphere of holy rites. Arias, cavatinas, cabalettas and symphonies were plentiful everywhere: in many cases they were transcriptions of pieces by well-known composers (it was sufficient to give them a “liturgical” title); more often they were homely elaborations. Almost all these pieces are being performed here for the first time in the modern age; the composers are practically unknown; in their music, famous opera themes are freely mixed with fanciful variations on those themes. The purpose was to reproduce this atmosphere, at once theatrical and sacred, in its entirety, by means of period instruments: a wonderful nineteenth-century organ and a series of precious original brass instruments. In fact Marco Arlotti is sitting the Adeodato Bossi Urbani 1874 organ, and Michele Santi, a specialist in nineteenth-century trumpets, is playing seven different period instruments delivering the best and most characteristic sound to each track.

Rudolf Tobias (1873–1918) founded the classical-music tradition in Estonia almost single-handedly, writing the first Estonian orchestral piece, the first Estonian string quartet, first Estonian piano concerto and the first Estonian oratorio, the monumental Des Jona Sendung, from which Ines Maidre has now transcribed for organ the blazingly powerful Sanctus. Although Tobias was himself an outstanding organist, he wrote little music for his own instrument and most of it is modest in scale, but its quirky craftsmanship reveals the hand of a master.

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Rudolf Tobias (1873–1918) is credited with founding the classical music tradition in Estonia, having written the first Estonian orchestral piece, piano concerto, piano sonata, oratorio, and string quartet. He studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakoff and then had a wide-ranging career in Tartu, Paris, Munich, Dresden, and finally as Professor of Theory at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. At the outbreak of war in 1914, he was drafted into the German army, serving as an interpreter. His health began to fail in 1916 and he was discharged, and died of pneumonia in October of 1918.

This program of his complete published organ works reveals a composer of well-crafted, pleasant liturgical “gebrauchsmusik” based on chorale tunes. It is all modest in scope, nothing lasting much over five minutes. It is unfortunate that he left nothing substantial for the organ, as he was considered an outstanding organist. The booklet contains notes on the composer and music as well as the specification of the 1913 Sauer organ (rebuilt in 1998) in the Dome Church (St Mary’s) in Tallinn, Estonia.

-- American Record Guide

"A central figure in Danish musical life, Otto Malling's (1848–1915) substantial output of organ music was cast in the form of eleven suites of ‘mood pictures’ inspired by the Bible. Two of the three suites on this CD have never been recorded before.
Organist Sverker Jullander is Professor of Musical Performance at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden.
The 1909 organ of the Vasa Church, Gothenburg (rebuilt, 1943, 2002) is ideally suited to north European late-Romantic music."

Charles-Marie Widor’s ten organ symphonies sit at the heart of his extensive oeuvre. They reveal Widor’s mastery of the form with their profundity, technical difficulty and sonorous color. Symphony No. 7, Op. 42, No. 3 inaugurated a new, orchestral approach to the genre and encompasses dreamlike sonorities, Chopinesque melancholy and majestic bravura. The Symphonie gothique, Op. 70 makes explicit reference to Gregorian chant, developing a kind of theological ‘programme music’ that is both austere and consolatory.