Bach Family - Bach Family Organ Music - Militello, Sergio (organ)
BACH FAMILY:
Heinrich Bach
Johann Michael Bach
Johann Bernard Bach
Johann Lorenz Bach
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
Johann Ernst Bach
Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach
Johann Christian Bach
Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach
Sergio Militello, organ
The most famous scion of a musical family which stretched across at least ten generations, Johann Sebastian Bach had a very strong sense of history, tradition, and his evolving place in it, and was instrumental in curating and adding to the library of the music of the Bachs, which was known as the Altbachisches Archiv. This archive mostly comprises vocal music; now the Italian organist has created a fascinating instrumental counterpart, with short organ works by ten members of the family ranging from Heinrich Bach (1615-1692) to Wilhelm Friedemann Ernst Bach (1779-1845). And so, during the course of the disc, we move, always guided by the constraints of Protestant thought and liturgy, through austere low Baroque chorales to spectacular, late-Classical fantasias.
Militello has chosen an organ of ideal size and disposition for this repertoire: a new instrument, built to Baroque specifications within the vestry of the magnificent Lower Austrian Benedictine Abbey of Melk, overlooking the Danube on a rocky outcrop and providing a dramatic backdrop to what is already music of continually shifting rhetoric and invention.