Ton Koopman's organ recordings may be less well known than his work as a historical-performance conductor, but they're well worth investigating even for casual fans of the Baroque organ. He has a knack for finding appealing material and interpreting it in a way that, to put it simply, is a lot of fun. If you find Koopman's booklet notes online (written in French, given in English and German translations as well), you may be confused by the sentence "What a joy it is to play on fine Iberian historic organs." In fact, the ...
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Ton Koopman's organ recordings may be less well known than his work as a historical-performance conductor, but they're well worth investigating even for casual fans of the Baroque organ. He has a knack for finding appealing material and interpreting it in a way that, to put it simply, is a lot of fun. If you find Koopman's booklet notes online (written in French, given in English and German translations as well), you may be confused by the sentence "What a joy it is to play on fine Iberian historic organs." In fact, the organ heard here is neither historic nor Iberian; it is an organ in a church in suburban Brussels, built in the Spanish style in 1985. Koopman said it "speaks with a slight Brussels accent." But he's quite right that it sounds entirely unlike the North German organs familiar to anyone who owns a few Bach discs, and, as with those instruments, it seems to have an almost symbiotic relationship with the music written for instruments of its type. The most distinctive pieces are the three...
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