Middelschulte: Goldberg Variations BWV988 arranged for Organ

Sonnentheil, Jürgen

CPO 777215

Ferruccio Busoni himself termed him the »master of counterpoint« and the greatest contrapuntist since Bach: Wilhelm Middelschulte, who was born in Werwe, Westphalia, in 1863, worked in Chicago beginning in 1891, and died in Dortmund in 1943 during a visit to his native Germany. During his lifetime Middelschulte was regarded as the organ virtuoso par excellence. Our fourth CD featuring his organ works presents the recording premiere of his finely nuanced arrangement of Bach's Goldberg Variations (wariacje goldbergowskie). Middelschulte's intensive correspondence with Busoni shows that in his arrangements as well as in his interpretation of Bach's originals his operating assumption was that greater justice could be done to Bach's intentions on the large-scale, late-romantic organ than on the instruments that had been available to Bach. In 1935 he wrote, »The modern instrument enables the organist to reconstruct according to Bach's intentions. « And it is precisely the seeming discrepancy between his unmistakable adherence to Bach's compositional design and his interpretation of his works on a symphonic organ that lends the arrangement its special appeal. Two stylistically clearly demarcated musical epochs leave their relatively unmodified traces in the arrangement, and their mingling produces the aesthetic gain. Additions and slight modifications result in an additional density and intimacy in the variations.

CD x 2

CPO

4/11/07

761203721528