cpo Concludes Recording Pachelbel Organ Music

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the beginning of this past November, the German cpo label released the third volume in its project to record the complete organ music of Johann Pachelbel. The first release of the project took place in the summer of 2013 in the form of a five-CD box set of performances by four organists: Christian Schmitt, James David Christie, Jürgen Essl, and Michael Belotti. In October of 2016, this site reported the release of the second volume, with two CDs of performances by three of the four organists that performed for the first volume. (Schmitt was absent from this volume.) At that time it was announced that the entire project was expected to fill ten CDs. Sure enough the third volume consists of three CDs, each presenting performances by a different organist, Belotti, Schmitt, and Christie, respectively. All recordings in the collection were made from performances on historic organs in central and southern Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.

The report on the second volume observed that each CD was organized around an overall “topic,” based, for the most part, on the liturgical calendar. The same can be said of the third volume but with the caveat that, in all of the volumes, the categories are relatively loosely defined. Nevertheless, most of the music is associated with some kind of sacred context, primarily chorale preludes and fugues based on earlier settings of liturgical texts. Nevertheless, the third volume offers a few “secular” toccatas and fugues, along with one arietta and one chaconne (which is not the infamous “Pachelbel’s canon,” which was written for string instruments, rather than organ).

The author of Pachelbel’s Wikipedia page observes that Pachelbel’s compositions are “less virtuosic and less adventurous harmonically than that of Dieterich Buxtehude,” who was Pachelbel’s senior by about fifteen years. However, only six CDs are necessarily to account for all of Buxtehude’s organ compositions. Johann Sebastian Bach, on the other hand was over thirty years younger than Pachelbel. Bach’s eldest brother Johann Christoph had studied under Pachelbel. Sebastian, on the other hand, first became interested in Buxtehude when he was in his teens and would later upset his employer (the New Church in Arnstadt) by taking an extended leave to walk 280 miles to Lübeck to listen to Buxtehude play his original compositions. Buxtehude was probably a far greater inspiration than Pachelbel; and the Bach 2000 anthology allocates sixteen CDs to Bach’s organ works!

Nevertheless, it would be unfair to try to “rank order” Buxtehude or Pachelbel alongside Bach. Those with a serious interest in the organ music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should definitely take advantage of the availability of “complete works” collections of those respective composers’ compositions for organ. It is therefore more than a little satisfying to report that cpo has now completed their project to honor Pachelbel’s achievements.