The music on this disc will be unknown to most general listeners, and the works by Georg Dietrich Leyding is mostly unfamiliar even to organ specialists. Despite its obscurity, the disc is of interest to anyone who loves Bach's organ music. The cover is a little misleading in labeling the 11 pieces here as the "complete organ works" of Leyding and Nicolaus Bruhns; they are simply the few surviving scraps of what were presumably much larger bodies of work. Both these composers were students of Dietrich Buxtehude, whom Bach ...
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The music on this disc will be unknown to most general listeners, and the works by Georg Dietrich Leyding is mostly unfamiliar even to organ specialists. Despite its obscurity, the disc is of interest to anyone who loves Bach's organ music. The cover is a little misleading in labeling the 11 pieces here as the "complete organ works" of Leyding and Nicolaus Bruhns; they are simply the few surviving scraps of what were presumably much larger bodies of work. Both these composers were students of Dietrich Buxtehude, whom Bach walked a few hundred miles to hear, and their music has some of the quasi-improvisatory quality of Buxtehude's. Both composers revel in the sheer sound of the organ, and hearing the 1724 instrument played here by Friedhelm Flamme one is reminded that the Baroque German organ is one of the great engineering marvels of civilization. Some of these works have the name "Praeludium," but they are multisectional pieces with fugal passages, actually closer to Bach's Preludes and Fugues than...
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