Brahms

Complete Works for Organ Adriano Falcioni (organ)

Brilliant Classics 94460 60:41 mins Brahms’s output for the organ – the product of youth and (relative) old age with nothing in between – fits easily onto a single disc. Adriano Falcioni’s latest recording joins fellow ‘completists’ Werner Jacob (Philips), Kevin Bowyer (Nimbus) and Robert Parkins (Naxos). His chosen instrument is the 1904 Rieger organ installed in Amelia Cathedral just two years after the posthumous publication of Brahms’s swansong: 11 chorale preludes bestowing a last nod to his life-long fascination with the music of JS Bach; and, for the most part, confronting notions of mortality intensified by his own declining health and the recent death of Clara Schumann.

Falcioni’s are forthright readings, though he misses some of the panache Parkins brings to the early works. The A flat minor Fugue on a rather Lisztian subject is appropriately ruminative, but the A minor Prelude’s ‘phantasticus’ nod to Buxtehude sounds a touch muted. And in the Op. 122 chorale preludes Parkins’s greater spaciousness allows Brahms’s chromatic and contrapuntal densities to register with less congestion. Falcioni nonetheless steers a cooly observant path through the harmonic thickets of ‘Mein Jesu, der du mich’, and negotiates the radiant Bachian serenity of ‘Schmücke dich’ with eloquent directness. ‘★erzlich tut mich erfreuen’, however, hides its rejoicing behind gauze, while in the first version of ‘O Welt’, the poignant undertow of farewell falters. Parkins on Naxos has the edge. Paul Riley PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★★★