Buxtehude/Bach J.S.: Organ Music for Christmas

Bach, Johann Sebastian, Buxtehude, Dietrich

Rampe, Siegbert

MDG 341 1511-2

Fata Morgana • It was in the middle of the Arizona desert that Siegbert Rampe discovered a new organ with a sound picture and construction design corresponding to those of its famous Northern German and Dutch models from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – an instrument made to order for a CD featuring selected works by Bach and Buxtehude, including three recording premieres! Unexpected Rescue MDG’s original intention was to complete its Mozart edition with Siegbert Rampe on historical harpsichords in Arizona. When the technical difficulties experienced by a local radio station posed a threat to the successful live recording of an organ concert, MDG’s microphones came to the unexpected rescue and ended up documenting an instrument otherwise unknown in Europe. How it was that a Christmas program was performed in Arizona at the beginning of March is another story and one that remains to be told in the “Only in America Encyclopedia.” • Well-Tempered Monument Robert Clark’s organ with twenty-nine stops was planned for the State University in Tempe, near Phoenix. The models for this fully mechanical organ built in 1992 by Paul Fitts & Co. were the superb instruments by Arp Schnitger of Hamburg. Its “well-tempered“ character was provided after Herbert Anton Kellner – which made it seem ideal for the performance of Buxtehude’s late works and Bach’s works. Nova Organa • Siegbert Rampe presents a total of three works never before heard on CD. The Toccata BuxWV 155, an important work by the Lübeck composer, was reconstructed in full by this expert; it had previously been transmitted in mutilated form in its sole source from 1684. Rampe also has an original version to offer from Bach’s pen: the Pièce d’Orgue in G major BWV 572a, copied by the composer’s second cousin Johann Gottfried Walther around 1715 and previously unrecorded in this version. The original version of the Toccata in F major BWV 540/1a only recently became known, and it is with it that Rampe rounds off his trio of first recordings. Peter Philips Complete Keyboard Works .

CD x 1

MDG

30/06/2008

760623151120