Maria Magdalena Kaczor: Portraits

Albumbeschreibung

The great majority of albums of works for organ use a single instrument, and highlight the repertoire which works best for it. The Polish organist Maria-Magdalena Kaczor has done the opposite: her album uses six different organs, for a repertoire that runs from the first baroque music by Sweelinck to Karg-Elert's 20th-Century symphonic music, by way of the elder and younger Bachs, and others. The album uses six instruments from German's Rhineland-Palatinate: the Hubert Fasen organ (2011) from the church of Saint Remigius in Zemmer; the Balthasar König (1715, restored by the same Hubert Fasen in 1997/98) and located at Saint Leodegar at Niederehe; the Hubert Fasen organ (of course!) built in 2010 in the church of Saint Luzia in Daun-Waldkönigen; the Conacher organ (first built in 1914, restored in 2012 by… you guessed it… Hubert Fasen) from the church of Saint Amandus in Kordel; and the Alfred Hunter organ from 1870, re-organised (all together now: by Hubert Fasen) in 2014, and placed in the church of Saint Ambrosius in Irrel, still in the same region of Eifel in Rhineland-Palatinate. The reader will have noticed that Maria-Magdalena Kaczor has chosen instruments from one particular region of Germany - the Rhineland - but from many different times. Note also the remarkable feat of sound engineering that means that the six instruments have been recorded in a very even way: a real tour de force, given how hard it is to place microphones for an organ, let alone the six that feature on this album... © SM/Qobuz