Mendelssohn: Preludes and Fugues – Adam Lenart

Mendelssohn never quite got the credit he deserved as a keyboard colorist, and this new disc from Adam Lenart raises the question all over again — what happens when you take music conceived for hammers and dampers and hand it to a instrument that breathes instead of strikes?

The Six Preludes and Fugues op. 35 were written for piano, full stop. Everyone knows the story, or should: Mendelssohn assembling fugues composed at different points across a decade, arranging them Bach-fashion with preludes as curtain-raisers, publishing the set in 1837 as a kind of homage to the Well-Tempered Clavier filtered through Leipzig Romanticism. He himself made an organ arrangement of only one of them, the Fugue in E minor, scored for four hands — and it’s this scrap of precedent that Lenart leans on to justify transplanting the whole set onto the pipes. Bold. Not unreasonable. Not entirely successful either.

Here’s the thing about organ transcription: it either finds something the original didn’t know it had, or it just proves the original knew what it was doing in the first place. Liszt transcribing Bach organ works for piano gained sonority, gained a kind of visionary bigness the instrument invites. Going the other direction is harder. Piano figuration – especially Mendelssohn’s, which loves to scurry in thirds and doubled octaves across the whole keyboard – doesn’t always want to become organ figuration. It wants fingers, not wind.

The opening Allegro con fuoco of the Prelude in C minor still has real dash in Lenart’s hands (or feet — the pedal work throughout is unfussy and clean), and if you squint your ears you can hear an ancestor-line running forward toward Widor and Vierne, toward that French Romantic tradition of glittering figuration wrapped around a plain tune. It’s a legitimate lineage even if Mendelssohn never asked to join it. The fugues fare better than the preludes almost without exception — no surprise, since fugue writing already had two centuries of organ precedent behind it by 1837, and Mendelssohn was nothing if not a fluent contrapuntist steeped in Bach from adolescence, thanks to Zelter’s tutelage and those Sunday mornings at the Singakademie poring over manuscripts nobody else in Berlin much cared about.

Where it goes wrong is mostly a matter of instrument, not conception. The Paschen organ in the Martin-Luther-Kirche in Detmold, built in 2007 for a neo-Gothic barn from 1898, is a competent modern instrument saddled with an unhelpfully dry room. Sound doesn’t bloom here so much as arrive and stop. The mid and low registers have a wooliness that no amount of registration cleverness quite dissipates, and in music that depends on harmonic overlap and decay — as almost all organ music does, whatever the century — that’s a real liability. There’s an unglamorous reed stop deployed in one of the fugues that sits oddly forward in the balance, more nasal than characterful, and I found myself missing the sort of instrument that could let a cadence actually hang in the air rather than just… stop.

The genuinely idiomatic pieces here, the Three Preludes and Fugues op. 37 — composed directly for organ in 1837, dedicated to Thomas Attwood, tighter and more owned by the instrument from the first bar — fare rather better, if only because Mendelssohn wasn’t fighting his own material. Even so, I noticed some rhythmic unevenness in the second Prelude in G major that suggests either an interpretive choice I don’t buy or a slight loss of concentration in the take. Small thing. But these are small-scale pieces, and small things register.

Listeners wanting the op. 37 set played with more color and more architectural sweep have options — recordings on historic instruments with genuine Romantic pedigree bring out a richness this Detmold organ simply can’t summon, dry room or no. For the op. 35 transcriptions, Lenart’s disc is close to a novelty item, interesting as an experiment, occasionally persuasive, never quite indispensable. Worth a single curious listen. Not a repertoire staple in the making.