Organs, Toccatas & Fantasias / Johann Sebastian Bach, Marie-Claire Alain (1990)

This program can best be described as a journey across Baroque Europe in the company of Johann Sebastian Bach and one of the leading personalities of the world of organ music, Marie-Claire Alain. Bach travelled little during his lifetime, but director Bruno Monsaingeon extends the geographical scope of Bach's activities by including organs best suited to his music. The instruments featured here, at venues including Haarlem, Groningen, Rötha and Dresden, are ones which Bach himself would have played, or which were built to his specifications.

The repertoire includes:

Toccata in F Major

Trio sonata No 1

Fantasia and Fugue in G minor

Toccata and Fugue in D minor

Various chorale preludes Product Description

This treasure at last

This long-awaited presentation dedicated to Marie-Claire Alain is quite magnificent. To have from your armchair a leisurely world tour of great organs and cathedrals via Bach's towering masterworks, at the shoulder of one of his greatest living scholars and interpreters, what more could be asked?

From the benchmark audio recordings that had for so long been our only access to M-C Alain, we finally unveil this priestess of Bach as she speaks to her passion and depth of understanding in these compositions, and the intricacies of the instruments they command. With a lifetime of devotion to Bach's work, little wonder she appears as thrilled to share her knowledge and insights with us as we are to receive them.

Marie-Claire journeys with us from obscure villages to the major cities of Europe, conducting a study tour of the greatest organs in the world and elucidating Bach's life and genius along the way. We learn that several of these organs are considered so perfectly made they remain unmodified from the 17th century when Bach himself played them. I found Marie-Claire's comments on the building, catagorization and history of these mammoth and mysterious instruments, their peculiar uniquenesses of sonority and design, and the political/religious background of their creation to be a good part of the value of this DVD.

The other, of course, is watching her play. If you ever contemplated how any one artist elicits the avalanches of sound built into the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, the assurance and artistry of Ms. Alain's hands and feet flying nimbly over multiple keyboards, foot pedals, stoppers and levers at once is a revelation. In other moments witness the delicacy in subtle passages for which she is perhaps even more greatly renowned.

Sound and picture quality are excellent. Thankfully, this production for the most part is spared the over-caffeinated video editing that has plagued classical performance DVDs of late. November 22, 2008

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