Blind from age sixteen, Helmut Walcha learned to hear the world with a completeness that most sighted musicians never achieve — and the chorale preludes he composed across his long career carry that quality of concentrated listening in every bar. You don’t come to this music expecting the grand arc of a Bach passacaglia or the cumulative drama of a Reger fantasy. These are miniatures, deliberately, almost defiantly so. And miniatures make their own demands.
Wolfgang Rubsam studied with Walcha in Frankfurt, which gives this second installment in his projected four-volume survey a certain documentary authority — he absorbed these pieces at the source, and it shows in the naturalness of his phrasing, the way registration changes feel inevitable rather than calculated. The organ he’s playing has that lean, clear-voiced character well suited to counterpoint, and Rubsam uses it with considerable intelligence.
Walcha’s method here is strict without being sterile. Each prelude takes a Lutheran chorale — melodies that carry centuries of congregational breath in them — and works it through with a craft that owes everything to Bach and makes no apology for the debt. The influence isn’t imitation, though. It’s more like a conversation across time, conducted with great seriousness and occasional wit.
The wit surfaces most delightfully in “Herr Christ, der einig Gottes Sohn,” where Walcha deploys mutation stops to give the texture something almost impish — the counterpoint bobs and darts, the harmony surprises, and for two and a half minutes the music is simply a pleasure to inhabit. It’s the kind of piece that reminds you miniatures can be dense with personality.
“O Mensch, bewein dein Sunde gross” is another matter entirely. Bach’s own setting of this chorale in the Orgelbüchlein uses the falling semitone — that old rhetorical figure of the lament — to weight every phrase with Passiontide gravity, and Walcha does something similar, the sighing intervals accumulating into something genuinely affecting. Four minutes, and it earns every one of them.
But here is the problem — not with Walcha’s craft, not with Rubsam’s execution, but with the disc as an experience. Chorale preludes, by their liturgical nature, are threshold music. They precede something. They prepare a congregation for a hymn, a season, a sacrament. Stripped of that context and lined up in sequence on a compact disc, they lose a dimension. What functions beautifully as a single prelude — with its specific character, tempo, registration — becomes disorienting in a parade of them. The ear can’t settle. Each piece resets the world, and then it’s over, and then the world resets again.
This isn’t a complaint about the disc, exactly. Rubsam’s project is a legitimate and even necessary one — Walcha the composer deserves a complete documented legacy separate from his enormous reputation as a Bach interpreter, and future scholars and organists will be grateful for this. But sitting with the disc from beginning to end asks something of the listener that the music itself, in its original function, was never meant to ask. Shorter sessions, perhaps two or three preludes at a time, yield more.
The playing is unfailingly committed, the musicianship secure. This is the work of a performer who understood his teacher and has thought hard about what that understanding means. What it isn’t — quite — is an easy evening. Worth having. Approach with patience and intermission.
