July 3: The Great Eighteen Chorale Preludes (Jörg Halubek, organ)
Experience Virtual Reality Organ, or just put on your headphones
Welcome new readers — I’m glad to have you along. (When a newsletter reaches 1,000 subscribers as this one has, Substack’s algo seems to start promoting you more.) This newsletter collects my reflections on listening to the complete (known) works of J.S. Bach. (More on the project’s origin here.) I’m aiming to get through all of it by New Year’s Eve. We’re half way there! Some of my favorite posts so far:
On good fortune and overwhelming emotion (Peter Schreier and Karl Richter, BWV 140)
The Goldberg Variations, (Vikingur Olafsson, BWV 988)
Let’s kick off the second half of the Year of Bach with a set of organ works performed by the mid-career German Jörg Halubek. This is a pleasant collection of Chorale Preludes that were written in the final decade of Bach’s life. They’re known as the “Great Eighteen,” and are reminiscent of the Orgelbuchlein that we heard Jörg play a few weeks ago. These feel greater in ambition and scope: they’re longer, and feature themes that are often slow to fully develop. Melodies extend over many bars and call back to those heard in a different register several minutes before.
Put another way, excavating the embedded richness was demanding a lot of concentration; it being midsummer, I found myself contented just letting these sounds wash over me.
Jörg’s playing meets the material — very warm and dignified. He also pulls unusual sounds out of the organ, which helps keep things engaging through an extended recording.
Below is a video where you can sit with him in virtual reality as he plays the Ansbach church organ. You can scroll around the beautiful and nearly empty room, it’s nice/creepy:
The recording is from 2020 on the Berlin Classics label, and covers BWV 651-668 and 769 (Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube):
Here are highlights, with many focused on the peculiar and lovely sounds of this instrument.
My favorite moments from the Great Eighteen are from BWV 659 and 662: quiet poppin’, slow, mournful, with an everlasting promise of hope.
659:
662:
A bass note to swallow the world at the end of BWV 666:
The wobbling tremolo effect heard in BWV 653b is the soundtrack to the climactic moment of an unmade 80’s movie about sentient video games:
Is that a xylophone in the back of BWV 655? Something sounds mallet-y in this organ:
Percussionny bells conclude the third movement of BWV 769:
Love the circusy chromatic line leading into an absurd foghorn bass in BWV 665 (0:28):
The record concludes with BWV 668 - we’re in church, the window’s open, we’re both inside and out, it’s overcast, maybe misting, runny noses all around, the birds telling each other about worms in the distance. Bach has a message for you to wonder about on your walk back home that goes something like this:
That mallet-y effect in 655 may be the particular "chiff" attack of a tracker-action organ. In these instruments, pressing a key mechanically opens the corresponding pipe--compared with modern organs, where pressing a key closes an electrical switch, which then opens a pipe--and this produces a sharp attack that sends fans of baroque organs into a swoon. There has been a renaissance of baroque-style organs since around 1960, and several contemporary organ builders specialize in tracker-action organs, including Flentrop in the Netherlands and Charles Fisk in Glouster, MA.
Love the drunken clown passage in BWV 665!