Mendelssohn Organ Works – Yuval Rabin

Listening to Mendelssohn on an organ he never touched but might have recognized instantly — a Braun/Mathis instrument from 1813, restored in 2011 to something close to its original disposition, wheezy stops and all restored to their rightful pitch and color — is a strange experience. Yuval Rabin has made a specialty of this kind of time travel, and on this disc it pays off, mostly, though not without moments where you wish for a little more muscle in the pedal division.

Mendelssohn’s organ music occupies an odd place in the repertoire. He was the great Bach revivalist of his generation — he all but single-handedly restored the St. Matthew Passion to the concert hall — and yet his own organ works wear their counterpoint lightly, almost apologetically, as though embarrassed to be caught being learned. The three Preludes and Fugues of op. 37 open this program. The C minor immediately establishes what this particular organ can do: pedal notes that arrive with real definition, not the customary basement rumble you get from bigger Romantic instruments. You feel each one land. The G major Prelude that follows is where the instrument’s softer registers get to breathe: a creamy, unforced lyricism, faintly reedy, that never once suggests hurry.

The two little Andantes, in D major and G minor, are palate-cleansers really, occasional pieces Mendelssohn tossed off amid grander projects. Rabin treats them that way: unfussy, brief, content to be minor. Nothing wrong with that.

The main business here is the Sonata No. 2 in C minor and the Sonata op. 65 No. 4 in B-flat major, drawn from the set of six sonatas Mendelssohn assembled — really compiled, cannibalizing earlier voluntaries and improvisations — for an English publisher in 1845 who wanted “voluntaries” and got something considerably weightier. The Grave opening of the C minor sonata is genuinely strange, harmonically restless in a way that looks forward past Mendelssohn’s own century, and Rabin lets it sit in its ambiguity rather than resolving it too quickly with tempo. The fugal finale has real backbone.

It’s the B-flat sonata, though, where the historical instrument earns its keep. The Allegro con brio’s rapid figuration comes through softer-edged here than on modern or Romantic organs. You lose some transient clarity, admittedly, the attack of each note slightly veiled rather than etched. But what you gain is a wash of overtone color that a bigger instrument simply can’t produce. Compare Kay Johannsen’s Carus recordings of the complete sonatas, made on a considerably larger and more forward-sounding organ: cleaner in some ways, more immediately thrilling, but also more generic, more anywhere. The Andante religioso of the Fourth Sonata is the real test case. On Rabin’s instrument it becomes genuinely devotional, hushed, a little threadbare at the edges in exactly the way that feels right. You believe you’re hearing something Mendelssohn himself might have improvised after a long Sunday service in Leipzig, tired, half-thinking about something else.

The disc’s real curiosity is Yuval Rabin’s own Hommage à Mendelssohn, a ten-minute homage that wears its debts openly — you hear the sequential harmonic language, the fondness for stepwise inner voices, even a few gestures that could be lifted wholesale from the Sonata in F minor. It’s not a major statement. It doesn’t pretend to be. But it’s an intelligent bit of ventriloquism, and placing it alongside the genuine article is a shrewd programming choice rather than an act of vanity — which is not always something you can say when performers include their own compositions on a disc otherwise devoted to the dead.

MDG’s engineering captures the room as much as the instrument, which is right for this repertoire. You get a sense of stone and air around every note, faint decay trails that tell you this is a real space and not a studio. Listeners weaned on modern organ recordings — bright, forward, every rank etched in daylight — may find this all a bit recessed, a bit soft-focus. Call it atmosphere instead. Not a first choice for the complete sonatas if clarity is your priority — Johannsen still serves that purpose ably — but as an alternative window onto this music, lit differently, it’s worth your time.