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GRAMOPHONE (04/2016)
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Reviewer: Jonathan Freeman-Attwood

Few organists specialising in the great oeuvres of 17th and 18th-century North Europe find such satisfying complicity between the instrument, their musical instincts and programming as Ton Koopman. Taken as a single, unfolding experience, this recital celebrates the recent restoration of pipework from a previous organ of the 1660s now sitting within the hybrid Zacharias Hildebrandt instrument in Lengefeld, Saxony, completed in 1726; Koopman exploits its warm colours with affection and considered enquiry.

Hildebrandt was a maker whom Bach admired, so Koopman has devised a programme of works which span the old-school ricercar world of his fellow countryman, Sweelinck, via the nascent Rococo sentiments of Homilius towards the evergreen and incremental wonders of Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor. If the Dutchman’s D minor Fantasia rather outstays its welcome, it’s not because of Koopman’s tendency in previous years to over-elaborate; indeed, the sobriety of the small-scale chorale preludes and variations presents a delightful foil to the studied flamboyance of the stylus phantasticus, evident in a supremely accomplished sense of timing and shape in the Buxtehude Toccata.

This virtue is extended in Walther’s Concerto after Albinoni, bursting with the logic, cohesion and flair that recall Concerto Amsterdam’s most alluring essays in the Baroque orchestral sphere. Such music can so easily sound prosaic. The Bach ‘tableau’ at the end is surprising in its plain speaking. Koopman’s historical histrionics and quirkiness – both the biddable and exhausting – are expunged from memory in performances whose character is left as much to the imagination as to imposed gesture. If not a dazzling programme, its attractive esotericism allows us to view Koopman in a new light. The great Passacaglia is gloriously seasoned and immediate.

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