Bruhns / Leyding: Organ Works (Complete)

Chronique

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 to Buxtehude, for they have fewer sections than Buxtehude uses. Check out track 5 (Bruhns) or track 7 or 9 (Leyding) for typical procedures showing the best and worst of each composer -- the best being the rumbling, virtuoso pedal passages that open each piece and the worst being the simple fugue subjects that suffer in comparison with Bach's contrapuntal art. There are also quieter chorale-based pieces. Sound quality is superb, and the available SACD version of this disc ought to be enough to bring the house down -- literally. The liner notes contradict themselves as to the deathdate of Bruhns, with the track listing giving it as 1697 and the German text stating that he died in 1689. Amusingly, the English and French translators seem to have spotted this gaffe; the English text fudges the issue, while the French reverts to 1697. The 1697 date is correct.
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