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Titled after the architectural style of the two churches to which they were dedicated, the final two symphonies of Charles-Marie Widor represent his most arresting and original compositions for organ. Written as concert works, these symphonies pay homage to the church through the use of chant themes-the “Gothic” with the Christmas introit, Puer natus est nobis (“Unto us a Child is born”) and the “Romane” with the Easter gradual Haec dies quam fecit Dominus (“This is the day the Lord has made”). David Fuller is a well-known scholar of French music and brings these late works of Widor to life brilliantly in this recording. 24-bit Technology and extensive notes on the music and organ.
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World Premier Recording! A contemporary of Max Reger, Hans Fährmann wrote monumental - and monumentally difficult- works for vast organs in which the display of contrapuntal mastery was a central feature. This first recording of his eighth sonata is accompanied by another first: a triptych arranged from Wagner's Meistersinger. David Fuller plays the large symphonic Fisk organ of SUNY-Buffalo.
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The three monumental works recorded here (Liszt's Ad Nos, Reubke's Psalm 94 and Stehle's Saul) represent three “generations” of a musical species that evolved with nineteenth-century romanticism and died out without ever acquiring a distinctive name. It was nourished above all by a new preoccupation with the expressive and pregnant “theme”–anything from a motif to a whole tune–as the essential constructive element of a piece of music. Along with this went an obsession with unity, specifically, a fascination with the idea that a large composition could be unified and its parts linked together by the periodic return or the constant presence of such a theme, either unchanged or modified, fragmented, and “developed” in the manner of a Beethoven symphony, or “transformed” into something quite different in character but still recognizable. Extensive notes on the music and the organ. A second, narrated version of the Stehle is provided without additional cost.
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