When I picked this out of a review list, admittedly
without much due care and attention, I had in mind that it might be
a sequel or partner to a disc I looked at not so many weeks ago, played
by Yuval Rabin at the excellent Braun/Mathis organ in St. Marzellus,
Gersau (see
review).
These two discs are however unrelated, and one has to wonder at the
wisdom of releasing two Mendelssohn organ discs including overlapping
repertoire quite so hot on each other’s heels. This recording
from Adam Lenart does however carry its own secret - in plain view,
if not quite in
Plein Jeu.
The organ here is one by the Paschen Company of Kiel from 2007, which
finds itself in the neo-Gothic Martin Luther Church in Detmold, completed
in 1898. This is a decent enough sounding instrument, though the relatively
dry acoustic doesn’t really give its sonorities much of a chance
to blend and develop. Comparing this with Yuvan Rabin’s disc in
the
Three Preludes and Fugues Op. 37 shows how much the character
on an instrument is defined by its surroundings. The older instrument
has more colour to start with, but the mildly woolly mid and lower range
of the modern instrument is not really helped much by the Martin-Luther-Kirche.
One can get used to this sound fairly easily and it is in no way really
bad, but there are plenty of other instruments which you have to imagine
would have been better suited for such a recording.
The USP for this disc is in the
Six Preludes and Fugues Op. 35,
as they are in fact written for the piano. Adam Lenart has prepared
this version for organ, and the booklet notes cite Mendelssohn’s
own arrangement for organ four hands of his
Piano Fugue in E minor
as a precedent. Lenart has kept “strictly to Mendelssohn’s
original text”, though of course using the stops, pedals and other
advantages of the organ to make these pieces into effective organ works.
The opening
Allegro con fuoco prelude is pretty pianistic, but
if you think of Widor and other Romantic composers for organ it fits
in well with a tradition of increasingly spectacular figuration around
uncomplicated melodies. Thus launched, the fugues are equally if not
more convincing though this is to be expected, the fugue being in an
even longer tradition and already leaning on the examples of Bach and
others. Not all of these pieces are ideally set or performed here however.
There is a certain amount of bumpiness in the rhythm in, for instance,
the second
Prelude in D major, and the reed stop used for the
melody sounds a bit like a naff melodica. One has to expect changes
in flexibility and approach between the more fleet touch you can obtain
with a piano, and while most of these pieces create some fascinating
new angles on these pieces, the results will have pianists either looking
up from their cups of coffee in interest or spilling them in shock and
horror. If you don’t know or play these pieces much then the effect
us more that of ‘new organ music from Mendelssohn’ rather
than enhanced/tortured piano repertoire, depending on the state of your
coffee cup. I suspect most pianists will not want to embrace this organ
version, but if you already like the
Organ Sonatas and the
Preludes
and Fugues Op. 37 then this arrangement by and large does manage
to reinvent the
Preludes and Fugues Op. 35.
As usual, we just have to ditch our prejudices and enjoy what’s
on offer. MDG’s recording is very good in the circumstances, though
the SACD surround effect is not a revelatory advantage when it comes
to the sound of the organ, which is alas not what I would call ‘demonstration’
quality.
Dominy Clements
[79:21]
