Search - Helmut Walcha :: Organ Masters Before Bach

Attractive but dismayingly incomplete (and annotation-less)

R. J. Stove | Gardenvale, Victoria Australia | 01/04/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Everything here comes from an Archiv Produktion anthology of the same title that Helmut Walcha (who died in 1991) recorded during the 1970s, originally occupying four LPs. In other words, the present CD - however well filled in terms of playing time - is dismayingly incomplete, and merely skims the surface of that splendid collection, which (like so many other boxed sets from its decade and earlier) remained available in Japan long after it fell out of print everywhere else. This is great for Nipponese music-lovers, but it grossly short-changes the rest of us.



What we do have here is mostly very attractive, Walcha's style being as superhumanly lucid and tactful as one would expect from his Bach recordings, though often with an improvisatory character which nothing in those recordings foreshadows. Pachelbel's F minor CHACONNE, a rather turgid work under lesser artists' hands, here has a very agreeable forward momentum yet never sounds the slightest bit breathless; it benefits also, as do all other items, from a wonderful instrument (the 18th-century Schnitger organ in Cappel, Germany). The sound quality is - dare one say - perfect: with pleasing resonance, yet no detail gets blurred.



Problems: (a) the periodically very sharp pitch (least bearable in the Buxtehude items, most bearable in the Georg Boehm piece), sometimes almost a semitone above A=440; (b) the fact that Deutsche Grammophon disdains to provide a solitary syllable of annotations, and fobs us off with advertising! In what is presumably a world first for the hard-sell approach, advertising even disfigures the jewel-box's plastic disc-tray. Boo hiss. Several of the composers here represented (Franz Tunder, Nikolaus Bruhns and Vincenz Luebeck, to name just a few) are lucky to get more than three lines in the average music dictionary. When one considers how Naxos manages to supply authoritative and often fascinating booklet essays - sometimes in French and German as well as in English - with its own CDs, at a lower price than is being asked for this issue, Deutsche Grammophon's attitude looks positively miserly. (For organ releases Naxos usually provides stop-lists as well.) But if didactic considerations are meaningless to you, and if it's merely assured organ playing you want, then look no further."