Organ Duets: Hesse, Mozart and Handel – Golebiowski/Str

Two organs talking to each other across a nave. There’s something faintly theatrical about the whole enterprise, and this Hamburg-recorded disc leans into that theater without ever tipping into kitsch. Karol Golebiowski and Zygmunt Strzep relish the antiphonal give-and-take, the sonic ping-pong that goes back at least to the Venetians and their cori spezzati, though nobody here is trying to out-swagger Gabrieli. The repertoire is stranger and more provincial than that, and better for it.

Adolph Friedrich Hesse is the connective tissue, and rightly so. History has mostly forgotten him: a Breslau organist who taught half of Europe’s next generation and kept Bach’s flame lit when plenty of his contemporaries were happy to let it gutter out into salon triviality. His three Fantasies here, opp. 35, 36, and 87, are not showpieces in the Lisztian sense. They’re argument, counterargument, a working-out. You hear him thinking in terms of Bach’s toccata style while smuggling in the harmonic language of his own century, chromatic sidesteps that would have made old Sebastian raise an eyebrow. Golebiowski (I think — the two players aren’t always easy to tell apart in these forces, which may be the point) gives the op. 87 a dignity that never curdles into pomposity. Good. Hesse can sound pompous in lesser hands.

The real discoveries are the double-organ concertos. This is where the disc earns its keep.

Lucchinetti’s Concerto has real snap to it. The outer movements go with a kind of unbuttoned enthusiasm that makes you wish we knew more than a bare handful of facts about the man. The Allegro fairly crackles, articulation crisp, the two instruments trading gestures like quick-witted dinner guests finishing each other’s sentences. A small complaint: the Spirituoso movement plods slightly, the tempo held back as if in deference to some notion of gravitas the music doesn’t ask for. A shade more forward motion and the piece’s actual character, puckish, a little sly, would have come through more vividly. As it stands the articulation stays clean, so nothing is lost except a bit of sparkle.

Piazza’s sonata for two organs is a lesser find but a charming one, brief and unpretentious, functional church music of the sort that once filled the gaps between Mass propers all over Lombardy and nobody thought twice about it. Josef Blanco is barely a name at all, possibly an organist-harpist (an odd doubling, that) at Cuenca Cathedral. If the biographical trail runs cold, the six-minute Allegro he left behind argues for further digging. It’s genuinely brilliant writing, quick-witted, and the registration Golebiowski chooses on the St. Bernard’s organ, bright, reedy, treble-heavy, pairs beautifully against Strzep’s Beckerath portable, which has a drier, more chamber-like bite. Neither instrument swallows the other.

Mozart’s Fantasie, K. 594, originally written for a mechanical clock organ (Mozart loathed the commission and complained about it in letters to his wife), gets a reading of real sensitivity: no false grandeur, the counterpoint allowed to breathe. Beethoven’s little Adagio, WoO 33, is a slighter thing entirely, and the players understand that. They build the melodic arch patiently, pulling registration from somewhere deep in the pedal division and letting it climb, stop by stop, toward the light. A lovely piece of ear-engineering, subtly done.

The Hallelujah that closes things, presumably in John Marsh’s arrangement, though Pavane’s booklet is silent on the point, is oddly buttoned-up. After the exuberance of the Lucchinetti and the wit of the Blanco, a chorus this staid feels like closing the evening with a bow rather than a flourish. Handel deserves a bit more swagger, even transcribed, even on organ.

Sound is warm, the acoustic of St. Bernard’s generous without smearing detail. You can actually hear where one organ ends and the other begins, which matters in repertoire built on spatial dialogue. This isn’t a disc that will unseat anyone’s library of Bach or Buxtehude. It was never trying to. As an excavation of a forgotten practice, two organs, one conversation, it’s a genuine pleasure, occasionally a genuine revelation, and worth an evening of anybody’s curiosity.