Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1750)
Major Preludes and Fugues
Prelude and Fugue in E minor, BWV548 [14:00]
Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV545 [6:04]
Prelude and Fugue in C minor, BWV546 [11:59]
Prelude and Fugue in F, BWV541 [8:06]
Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV547 [9:32]
Prelude and Fugue in A, BWV536 [6:44]
Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV532 [11:26]
Prelude and Fugue in B minor, BWV544 [12:23]
Ullrich Böhme (organ)
rec. 6 May 2019 (St Wenzel Church, Naumburg), 20-21 November 2012 (St Thomas Church, Strasburg), 30 July 2019 (St Marien, Angermünde), 14 November 2019 (St Thomas Church, Leipzig)
RONDEAU ROP6178 [80:14]
On paper it makes good sense to include the eight 'great' Bach preludes and fugues on a single, well-filled CD. And it might seem that some variety would come from the fact that these recordings were made at four different locations, including St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, which is indelibly associated with Bach. Each of the other three locations houses a fine organ dating from Bach’s time. We would seem to be looking here at a recording which oozes authenticity and Bachian authority; a fact reinforced by the fact that the performances are all given by the current organist at St Thomas’s Church, Leipzig, Ullrich Böhme, and that the cover of the disc is adorned with Bach’s own personal monogram.
But what works well on paper, does not necessarily work so well in practice. Böhme is a muscular player, treating these works as great monuments and registering them accordingly. Bach, of course, never intended these works to be heard at a single sitting – indeed, in many cases he did not even intend the prelude and fugue to be heard as a single piece – and by sitting down and listening to them in one go, we risk obscuring the individual identity of each one. Despite the different instruments, Böhme’s decidedly masculine approach – flexing the full organ muscles of each of the instruments, brushing aside opportunities for variety of colour or timbre, and avoiding finesse in an attempt to underline the granite-like strength of Bach’s writing – draws very similar effects from each instrument. After a while one tires of hearing unrelenting full organ, even when the organ being pushed on us is one of the great historic instruments of Bach’s day.
It is not until track 11 (the Prelude and Fugue in A) that we get a break from the heavy, weighty registrations which dominate the performances. Here, on the Joachim Wagner Organ of St. Marien, Angermünde (built in 1745), we get something mercifully light and almost delicate, with a shy Zimbelsterm peeping out from behind the chuffy flutes of the Prelude. For the Fugue, while Böhme keeps the registration fairly light, he does tend to articulate the music as a series of staccato outbursts, which serves only to disrupt the contrapuntal lines, despite the occasional singling out of a subject entry on a different stop.
This tendency to attack the music as a solid entity rather than coax the charms from within it, informs all of these performances. In the case of the G major Prelude, with its bright, sunny disposition, we get a gushing, fountain-like opening which soon leads into something more in the manner of a triumphant call-to-arms, the swirling tones of the Strasburg Silbermann (dating from 1741) adding a sense of an unstoppable force. The thrusting opening statement of the E minor Prelude, is given great strength of purpose and an almost daunting grandeur by the heady tones of the great Zacharias Hildebrandt organ in Naumburg (built in 1746).
Of course, not all of these works were written for Leipzig – many date from Bach’s Weimar days – and, in any case, we often forget that it was as Kantor to the St Thomasschüle that Bach was appointed in 1723, and his main involvement was not with the organ at St Thomas church. Nevertheless, one can forgive Böhme for claiming his inheritance by performing two of the works on the organ in the church. This was built by Gerald Woehl in 1999-2000, and on this organ we hear the D major and B minor works. The former is an early work, certainly not one written in Leipzig, which Böhme bustles through with a firm sense of direction, tossing off all those pedal scales and that irritatingly insistent Fugue subject with ease, but making rather a meal of that passage which links prelude and fugue. As for the B minor, Böhme presents it as a hefty, monumental body of organ sound with a stronger sense of the vertical structure than the horizontal flow of the individual lines. The result is a powerful piece of organ playing but not something which really seems to dig beneath the surface to reveal any compelling musical insight. Organists will love this; but those whose musical interests stretch further may find the focus on big organ sound a little tiresome.
Marc Rochester
