Bach Family Organ Music – Sergio Militello

Family trees rarely yield this kind of harvest. The Bach dynasty produced more second-tier talent per generation than any clan in Western music, and the temptation to treat that fact as mere genealogical curiosity — a parlor trick, a “look how many Bachs there were” novelty disc — is one that record companies have never quite resisted. Sergio Militello’s new recital, drawn from eleven different Bachs and spanning roughly a century and a half of German organ writing, mostly resists it too. Mostly.

The disc clocks in modestly — under fifty minutes, which in an age of eighty-minute CDs raises an eyebrow before a single note sounds. One wonders whether a few more chorale preludes by, say, Johann Christoph (the “profound” one, as Johann Sebastian himself called his older cousin) might have rounded things out without straining anybody’s budget.

Still, there’s real interest in the particulars. Heinrich Bach’s “Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott” opens the program with an austerity that feels almost pre-Schein — thick, vocally conceived counterpoint, more motet than keyboard piece, the kind of writing that reminds you how much organ music grew out of choral practice rather than away from it. Militello plays it plainly, without fuss, registered on what sounds like a modest principal chorus. Good instincts.

The Prelude and fugue in E flat attributed to Johann Christoph Bach is lovely music — spacious, harmonically rich, with a fugue subject that unfolds with real patience. But New Grove flags this piece as doubtful, and Militello’s booklet note claims he sought out works of “proven authorship” without addressing the problem. That’s a credibility gap you can drive a Werkverzeichnis through. Attribution squabbles aren’t just musicological housekeeping; they shape how we hear a piece, what we expect from it, what family resemblance we listen for. To wave the question away is a disservice to listeners trying to use this disc as any kind of map.

Johann Michael Bach’s “Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist” is the gem here — barely two minutes long, aching in its chromatic inflections, the kind of piece that makes you wish for an entire disc of this undersung Bach (father-in-law, as it happens, to Johann Sebastian, whose own debt to Johann Michael’s vocal writing has never been fully reckoned with). Militello gives it space to breathe. The registration is sparse, reedy, almost confessional.

From there the disc gets choppier, both musically and in Militello’s curatorial choices. The two excerpted variations from Johann Bernhard Bach’s chorale partita on “Du Friedefürst, Herr Jesu Christ” are sandwiched between plain chorale harmonizations — a structure Militello says reflects “typical” liturgical practice. Maybe. The scholarship on how partitas were actually deployed in Lutheran services is thinner than his confidence suggests, and carving two variations out of a longer set, for reasons unexplained, feels more like a time-management decision than an interpretive one. I wanted the whole partita. Failing that, I wanted to know why not.

Carl Philipp Emanuel’s Rondo in G, Wq 57/3 — one of the “Kenner und Liebhaber” pieces — is a curious inclusion and, frankly, a mistake. This is music conceived for the sensitive dynamic shadings of clavichord or the new fortepianos C.P.E. championed; its empfindsamer Stil depends on the kind of micro-inflected touch an organ simply cannot deliver. On the Militello release the piece’s wonderful harmonic surprises — those sudden lurches into remote keys that made C.P.E.‘s contemporaries sit up — just lie there, flattened by an instrument that can only really do loud or soft, not in-between. A pity; elsewhere his registrational instincts are sound.

Things pick up with Wilhelm Friedemann’s Fugue in c minor — unnumbered in both the Falck and the newer BR catalogues, which ought to have prompted at least a sentence of explanation in the notes — and with Johann Ernst Bach’s Fantasia and fugue in F, a genuinely absorbing piece whose fantasia section wanders through some startlingly bold harmonic territory before the fugue snaps everything back into discipline. Militello’s playing here has real sweep; you can hear him enjoying the music, the tempo breathing naturally through the fantasia’s rhetorical pauses.

Johann Christian’s Fugue on B.A.C.H. closes the family circle nicely — the “London Bach,” writing decades after his father’s death, paying tribute (consciously or not) to the old contrapuntal religion he’d mostly abandoned for galant opera and symphonies. It’s well-built, a touch dutiful, and Militello dispatches it with crisp articulation, the inner voices admirably clear even at a fairly brisk tempo.

The instrument itself is never identified with any specificity I could glean, which is its own small frustration — reviewers of organ records live and die by stoplists, and their absence here leaves me guessing at an Italian or South German-style instrument with a bright plenum and not much by way of color reeds.

Worthwhile, in fits and starts. Militello is a sympathetic, unshowy guide, best in the earlier, more austere repertoire and least persuasive when the music wants a different kind of keyboard entirely. But the document