Bernard Foccroulle devotes his latest recording — the last of the anthology of Northern German organ music of the Baroque period — to Jacob Praetorius and Melchior Schildt, both pupils of Sweelinck. Praetorius and Schildt’s music is not only strongly marked by Lutheran tradition, in which the chorale played a fundamental part, but also by other influences, principally Italian, that prepared the way for the explosion of the stylus fantasticus at the end of the 17th century. © Ricercar