This disc of organ music presents a kind of program that was common back in the day of E. Power Biggs: the music of Bach is joined with that of his immediate, mostly North German predecessors, here Buxtehude, Scheidemann, Böhm, Lübeck, and Bruhns, and topped off by Mendelssohn's effort to revivify the style he had rediscovered. Large preludes with contrapuntal sections alternate with music to accompany the Lord's Prayer, "Vater Unser im Himmelreich." The program has two new aims. Its presentation on the Noack organ at ...
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This disc of organ music presents a kind of program that was common back in the day of E. Power Biggs: the music of Bach is joined with that of his immediate, mostly North German predecessors, here Buxtehude, Scheidemann, Böhm, Lübeck, and Bruhns, and topped off by Mendelssohn's effort to revivify the style he had rediscovered. Large preludes with contrapuntal sections alternate with music to accompany the Lord's Prayer, "Vater Unser im Himmelreich." The program has two new aims. Its presentation on the Noack organ at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Houston, TX, writes organist Leon Couch III, "demonstrates how the concepts and affections behind each work might be adapted to a more modestly sized organ" than the mighty instruments for which such works were originally composed. And, more importantly, Couch aims to draw a connection between the expressive world of the preludes and Baroque theories of rhetoric, of such ideas as proposition and confirmation -- an effort that would have delighted the...
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