This disc of organ music presents a kind of program that was common back in the day of
E. Power Biggs: the music of
Bach is joined with that of his immediate, mostly North German predecessors, here Buxtehude, Scheidemann, Böhm, Lübeck, and Bruhns, and topped off by
Mendelssohn's effort to revivify the style he had rediscovered. Large preludes with contrapuntal sections alternate with music to accompany the Lord's Prayer, "Vater Unser im Himmelreich." The program has two new aims. Its presentation on the Noack organ at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Houston, TX, writes organist Leon Couch III, "demonstrates how the concepts and affections behind each work might be adapted to a more modestly sized organ" than the mighty instruments for which such works were originally composed. And, more importantly, Couch aims to draw a connection between the expressive world of the preludes and Baroque theories of rhetoric, of such ideas as proposition and confirmation -- an effort that would have delighted the Baroque reader. Couch's booklet provides his thoughts on the Hamburger Rhetorik (Hamburg Rhetoric) of the title as it relates to each piece and its registration, along with the usual technical data of interest to organists. The overall result for the general listener is a selection of organ music whose expressive gestures are cleanly delineated and separated from one another, a free, indeed conversational style nicely complemented by the vivid, rather rough sound of the Houston organ. Neither Couch's playing nor the organ itself has the monumental sound that is the norm for this repertoire, but Couch offers an intriguing attempt at a playing style informed by the conditions and ideas under which an organist might have encountered the music of
Bach and his forerunners as it spread across Germany.