Wedding March Funeral March

CHRISTOPH SCHOENER

A total of four organs group themselves around the listener in three dimensions in St. Michael’s Church in Hamburg, and all four instruments are spectacularly employed on this Super Audio album. Church music director Christoph Schoener has designed a very special program for the organs in his workplace: music by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy that has never been heard before in just this way. Schoener pulls all the stops on the central console and covers a spectrum ranging from the complete late-romantic forces of the entire organ system to the filigree murmuring of individual tone colors. A special treat: a solo for the echo organ installed high above in the ceiling sphere! The Six Preludes and Fugues op. 35 forming the focus here, though originally intended for the piano, create a phenomenal impression on the massive St. Michael’s organ in this arrangement by Christoph Bossert. After all, it was Mendelssohn, who after the organ’s Viennese classical “dry spell,” supported the rehabilitation of this instrument. Accordingly, numerous piano pieces by him are ideally suited for transfers into the organ’s much mightier sound dimension. Things get underway with the so very famous “Wedding March” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even if many a bride and groom have entered many a church to this music, on this recording it is as if the listener could reach out and embrace the bride. Whether a “Song Without Words,” a lovingly supplied fragment, or a “Theme with Variations,” this Mendelssohn recording is a perfect complement to the Bach, Brahms, and Reger editions with which Christoph Schoener has brought delight to the organ world and beyond.

Price: $22.99