Felix Mendelssohn Batholdy: |Six Sonatas for Organ

A tour d’horizon of organ music: today’s organists can hardly do without the Six sonatas for organ, op. 65, by the Leipzig composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in their repertoire. The frequency in which they are performed is comparable to that of the great organ works by Johann Sebastian Bach. Mendelssohn’s composition in its musicality and expressiveness bridges the gap between Romantic and Baroque periods: it was written at a time when Bach’s oeuvre was being rediscovered, and when the organ otherwise received rather little attention. The music’s sweetness and softness, but also its force and strength demonstrate the German composer’s prowess. The Six sonatas are a kind of tour d’horizon of nineteenth-century organ music: the most traditional style for the organ, the fugue, features prominently in the closing movement of the second and the middle movement of the sixth sonata. Mendelssohn likewise harks back to Protestant chorales: the first and third sonatas both integrate a chorale in their opening movements. The sixth sonata is a large-scale chorale variation on ‘Vater unser im Himmelreich’. It is indeed a sea of diverse sounds, performed on this new CD by Ullrich Böhme, organist at St Thomas Leipzig. The instrument was built in 1889, roughly 40 years after Mendelssohn’s death.