Dual Baroque Organs at Muri Abbey – Strobl and Blunden

Antiphony is one of the oldest musical ideas in Western Christendom, and it still works. Place two choirs — or two organs — across from each other in a resonant stone space, let sound travel, and something almost physical happens to a listener. You feel it before you understand it.

The Abbey Church of Muri, in the Swiss canton of Aargau, has a pair of baroque organs built in 1743 by Joseph and Viktor Ferdinand Brossart — the Evangelienorgel and the Epistelorgel, flanking the High Altar on opposite sides — and they were made, quite literally, to talk to each other. Johannes Strobl and David Blunden play them here, and what they’ve captured, with Audite’s typically scrupulous engineering, is something genuinely rare: a album that makes spatial argument feel like musical argument.

Strobl is Muri’s Director of Music, and he knows this acoustic the way a good chef knows his stove. Blunden, Sydney-born, was new to me before this disc arrived — but not after.

The repertoire centers on the Viennese Habsburg court of the seventeenth century, which is a more interesting neighborhood than it might sound. Leopold I — that emperor of implausible names, Leopold Ignatius Joseph Balthasar Felician — was a genuine composer, not merely a royal dabbler, and his presence here alongside Giovanni Priuli gives the program an unexpected coherence. Priuli, the Venetian who served as Kapellmeister at the Habsburg court, opens the disc and sets the tone immediately: bright, declarative, antiphonal gestures passing between the two instruments like a conversation conducted at a civilized shout across a nave.

Leopold’s music is harder to assess fairly. He lived in the long shadow of his own political enormity — the man who expelled Vienna’s Jews, who fought the Ottomans at the gates, who patronized Biber and Schmelzer — and his compositional gifts tend to be underestimated as a result. What you hear here is music of genuine craft, if not of the first inspiration. The ornamental language is sophisticated; the harmonic vocabulary occasionally surprises.

Both organs are small by the standards we’ve been conditioned to expect from organ recordings. No thundering 32-foot pedal stops, no seismic rumbles. What they have instead is personality — a forthright, slightly reedy character in the middle registers, and a top-end sparkle that Audite’s microphones catch with the kind of detail that makes you lean forward. The bass is present without being dominant, which is exactly right for this music. Too much bottom and the antiphonal play gets muddied; here it rings clean.

The Choralschola der Cappella Murensis joins for the choral items — “O quam dulcis a 8,” “Victimae paschali laudes,” “Veni Sancte Spiritus,” and the Salve Regina — and the blend of voices with these particular instruments is persuasive. The schola sings with a directness that suits the liturgical austerity of the repertoire; no swooning, no unnecessary warmth. Muri Abbey has Habsburg bones, and the music sounds like it knows that.

Audite has built a remarkable catalog of organ recordings over the years. The first volume of their Franck set with Hans-Eberhard Roß remains one of the finest organ recordings I’ve encountered — the Goll instrument at St. Martin’s in Memmingen caught with a refinement that makes the standard Cavaillé-Coll approach to that repertoire sound blunt by comparison. The label’s Christmas Preludes from Muri, also with Strobl, had a bright-eyed freshness that I still think about. This new release belongs in that company.

Is this music that will change your life? Probably not. But it will remind you what it sounded like when the Church still believed that beauty was a form of argument — and that putting two organs across a nave from each other was a theological statement as much as an acoustic one. That’s worth an hour of anyone’s attention.