Koss 76 manual Argento Casa Guidi

paying for it, a detail that subsequently took on a certain importance). The reason I hadn’t heard them: Dorian had reinvented public relations, apparently using North Korea as a model, and when was the last time you received a CD from Pyongyang?

But with the back catalog in distri- bution once again we opened up some samples, and we were glad we did. These recordings are done with the usual Professor Johnson flair, and they are encoded in HDCD, the high definition process he helped develop.

Felix Hell is billed as an “organ sensa- tion,” and he is all of that. This young German-born prodigy moved to the US at the age of 14…to study at Juilliard! He was 17 when he recorded this collection in Lincoln, Nebraska. By then he had given some 250 concerts worldwide, which makes one wonder when he gets time for studies.

On the other hand, perhaps he knows all he needs to know for the moment, at least if I go by the music on this album, all from the 19th Century. It opens with Felix Alexandre Guilmant’s Sonata No. 1 in D Minor, which bears the subtitle Symphonie. This is not truly an organ symphony, however, and much of it is more introspective than the powerhouse organ works that have long been used as hi-fi showpieces. Only in the third and final movement does Hell open up with the organ’s considerable muscle. He is, however, very much at ease with the complex softer passages, a reflection of a maturity beyond his years.

Joseph Rheinberger, represented here by his Abendfriede (“evening peace”) was also a child prodigy, who entered the

Munich Royal Conservatory when he was 11. No fireworks here, as the name suggests. The finale of the Symphony No. 1 of Louis Vierne, long the organist of Notre-Dame de Paris, has lots more fire, and I have heard it many times, though it has always left me cool.

It was when Felix Hell gets into Liszt that I really perked up. The Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-His perhaps Liszt’s most forward-looking music, all but leaving behind the tone-based composi- tions that had always dominated Western music. The title is a pun on the name of Johann Sebastian Bach (note that this is a prelude and fugue), but is also a reference to the German names of the notes B-flat, A, C and B. There is no key signature stated, because Liszt used as much as he could of the black and white notes of the keyboard. The overall tone and structure are closer to the 20th Century than to the 18th. A number of organists play it with great flamboyance because…well, this is Liszt, after all. It benefits from more respect for its structure, which is why I prefer it played by Fernando Germani than by E. Power Biggs, say (I’ve been lucky enough to hear both live). Hell is closer to Germani, and he never either reaches for an easy effect or gets lost in the complexity of the music.

The CD ends with a longer Liszt piece, the Fantasy and Fugue on “Ad Nos ad Salutarem Undam, inspired by Mey-

erbeer’s opera Le prophète. This is rather austere music, as you might suppose from the fact that the opera was about John of Leyden, a 16th Century religious fanatic. However there are some dense variations on one of Meyerbeer’s themes, which is what drew Liszt to this (now) almost forgotten opera in the first place.

Keith O. Johnson has placed his microphones some distance from the organ in order to capture not only the sound of the pipes but also of the rever- berant interior or the First-Plymouth Congregational Church. Despite the distance the focus is excellent, and as the music progresses you get a good mental picture of the place. Recording levels are fairly low, with plenty of room for the pleins jeux passages.

The organ is a large one, and Felix Hell and the composers he plays take full advantage of the larger pipes. I found myself wondering what would be left of this music on a system without extreme bass response. On the Omega system it is awesome to listen to.

Argento: Casa Guidi

Von Stade & Minnesota Orch. Reference Recordings RR-100CD Lessard: The title of the album, which is also that of the first work on it, refers to the residence of celebrated poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, who exiled themselves to Florence fol-

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