Monday, August 30, 2021

Weinberger’s Reger Project: Volume 7

This month began with the German label cpo releasing the seventh volume in Gerhard Weinberger’s project to record the complete organ works of Max Reger. As I have previously observed, each volume has consisted of two CDs. Since the OehmsClassics complete-works Reger project, recording performances by Bernhard Buttmann, consisted of sixteen CDs, it would be reasonable to expect that there will be only one more two-CD release from cpo. Both of these projects seem to have begun with initial releases in 2014. However, Buttmann’s project concluded in 2016, the year of the 100th anniversary of Reger’s death. Weinberger’s sixth volume was released early in 2020, before the COVID pandemic; but, given the overall sluggishness of the release schedule, I am not sure that COVID can be blamed for the delay of this latest release.

On the other hand pandemic weariness may be one of the reasons that my patience in following the cpo series is beginning to wear more than a bit thin. However, there are other factors, some of which may be more significant. More substantive has been Weinberger’s piecemeal approach to some of the publications.

This new release involves excerpts from both the Opus 56 collection of “easy” preludes and fugues and the Opus 79b collection of thirteen chorale preludes. Bearing in mind that there is little motivation to perform either of these collections in its respective beginning-to-end order, many will probably treat the results of this recording project as a reference resource. So, unless the final release includes a “universal” index across the entire corpus, listeners in search of a specific composition are likely to feel frustrated. That difficulty is made all the worse by a front cover that does not give a particularly accurate account of the contents.

Where the recordings themselves are concerned, Weinberger’s approach to performance is likely to strike many as problematic. His approach to dynamic range runs a wide gamut from almost inaudible to earthshakingly loud. (The latter, of course, perfectly aligns with the pull-out-all-the-stops epithet.) It is one thing to appreciate the breadth of that dynamic range in a concert hall or a church with good acoustics, but most of us do not listen to recordings with audio equipment that does justice to such breadth. As far as I am concerned, the primary asset of a recording project like this one is to serve as a resource to prepare for listening to a particular composition in performance.

These factors have left me more sympathetic to the results of Buttmann’s project, but I still hope to follow Weinberger to his final two-CD release.

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