Reger / Marini - Complete Organ Music [CD]

The most comprehensive survey ever made of Reger's organ music, on a range of superb Austrian, German and Swiss instruments: a fitting tribute to the composer on the 150th anniversary of his birth. With just under 30 of 146 opus-numbered works and 15 further pieces and collections, organ music represents an impressive proportion of Max Reger's oeuvre, comparable to his chamber and piano music, but far more influential in shaping his image. Around 1900, Reger achieved his breakthrough as a controversial composer with his organ works. Organ works kept interest in him alive in times of oblivion and won him lasting international renown. Roberto Marini's feat of performing Reger's entire output for organ in Italy within a single year (2002) was followed in 2011-13 by this remarkable achievement on record. On the basis of authoritative new critical editions compiled by the Max Reger Institute, Marini recorded the works on historical instruments of Reger's time, which with their orchestral richness of colour and dynamic possibilities correspond to the soundworld of an epoch that believed in progress in every dimension and embodied a kind of striving heroism as an attitude to both life and art. As a teenage student, Reger demonstrated a comprehensive practical knowledge of Bach's organ music which naturally fed into his own early compositions such as the Organ Suite Op.16. In his 20s, Reger adapted and enlarged the chorale fantasia into larger-scale forms filled with intense Romantic expression and chromatic harmony. All the same, the Prelude and Fugue in C minor op. 29 (1898), dedicated to Richard Strauss, demonstrates that modern writing and expressive content are perfectly compatible with Baroque forms. In the Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H op. 46 (1900), he ventures to the extreme limits of harmonic and technical possibilities on the Romantic organ. There are richly evocative character-pieces, simple and touching chorale preludes and Bachian inventions alongside huge monuments such as the Passacaglia and Fugue: in all it's diversity, Reger's organ music defies classification. First released in individual albums on the Fugatto label, this box compiles Roberto Marini's Reger albums complete for the first time, together with an authoritative essay by Suzanne Pepp on Reger's output for organ.