North German Organ Music – Friedhelm Flamme

There is a particular pleasure — a slightly perverse one, I admit — in listening to an entire disc of organ music by composers nobody can quite place. You won’t find Saxer or the Düben brothers or poor obscure Nittauf in the standard reference books with anything more than a paragraph, if that. Yet here they are, fully formed voices, each one working out the same problems that would eventually occupy Buxtehude and, further downstream, Bach himself. Friedhelm Flamme, who has been chipping away at this repertory for CPO since 2004, clearly believes these footnotes deserve to be read in full. He is right.

The three Saxer preludes that open the program are the real discovery here. We know almost nothing about Georg Wilhelm Dietrich Saxer, not his birth year, not his teachers, nothing except that in 1634 he landed the plum job of organist at the Johanniskirche in Lüneburg, succeeding none other than Georg Böhm. That alone tells you his colleagues rated him highly. The Praeludium in D unfolds in the sectional, quasi-improvisatory manner typical of the stylus phantasticus: free flourishes giving way to a single fugal episode, then receding into a slow, almost valedictory close. You can hear, in embryo, the later separation of prelude and fugue into two discrete movements, the very split that Bach would eventually make definitive. Saxer isn’t there yet. He’s still thinking in one continuous breath, the fugue just one incident among several, not the structural payoff. The e minor prelude is looser still, full of those halting, rhetorical gestures, a scale broken off mid-flight, a sudden pedal solo stamping through the texture, that make this music sound like someone thinking aloud at the console.

Then the Dübens. Three of them, in fact: Andreas, his brother Martin, and Andreas’s son Gustav, a dynasty transplanted from Leipzig to Sweden, where they ran musical life in Stockholm for two generations. Gustav is the name anyone who knows this repertory will recognize, mostly because of the Düben collection at Uppsala, nearly 1,800 vocal and instrumental works he amassed, without which we’d know far less about Buxtehude’s vocal music. His own chorale setting here, “Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren,” is modest but touching, the cantus firmus laid out plainly in the manner of the older chorale-prelude tradition, without much of the ornamental filigree the North Germans would later pile onto such tunes. Andreas’s two chorale settings are sturdier, more contrapuntally worked, and his little Praeludium pedaliter in a minor packs a surprising amount of pedal virtuosity into two and a half minutes, gone before you’ve settled into it.

Nittauf is the disc’s odd curiosity: nine tiny preludes, several barely a minute long, functional pieces almost certainly meant as intonations to set the pitch and mode before a service. Some run under seventy seconds. Do not expect architecture. Expect gesture: a scalar flourish, a cadential formula, done. Taken individually they’re trifles. Taken together, they read as a kind of stylistic fingerprint of provincial organ practice around 1700, the everyday grammar beneath the grander rhetoric of a Buxtehude toccata.

Hintz and Neunhaber round things out with two contrasting chorale fantasias on Passion-adjacent texts, “Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” and the long, searching “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ,” the latter stretching past eight minutes and easily the emotional center of the whole program. Neunhaber treats the melody with real harmonic imagination, letting dissonances hang a beat longer than comfort would suggest. Schieferdecker’s brief “Meine Seele erhebt den Herren” closes things gently, almost as an afterthought, appropriate, since he’s better remembered today for his operas in Hamburg and his eventual post in Lübeck, Buxtehude’s old chair, than for organ music.

Flamme plays all of it with unfussy conviction, favoring clean articulation over romantic legato, letting the instrument’s reed stops bite where the writing calls for edge. I’d have welcomed a touch more air between phrases in the slower chorale settings. Some of this playing is almost too tidy, too swept-and-dusted, when a little rhetorical untidiness might serve the stylus phantasticus better. But the organ itself (uncredited in my listening notes, alas, though it sounds like a well-tempered historical instrument with plenty of color in the principals) is beautifully captured, with none of the swimmy reverberation that sinks so many organ recordings into mush.

Is this essential listening? Not in the way Bach or Buxtehude is essential. What Flamme and CPO have built, disc by disc, is something closer to an excavation: a map of the soil out of which the North German school grew, complete with its lesser strata, its false starts, its charming minor talents who never got the big job or the famous pupil. For anyone who loves this repertory, that map is worth having. Recommended, with real warmth, to the specialist; recommended with slightly more caution to everyone else.