Think of the organ and you think of church — and that is not entirely wrong, Stefan Fricke writes in the booklet: most of these “queens” stand in houses of God, and the bulk of the music composed for them serves worship. Originally, however, the organ is not a religious instrument at all. Its place is the arena, where, often together with horns and trumpets, it accompanies chariot races, gladiatorial combat and executions; and in antiquity, when its mechanism was still driven by water, it flanked the comic and pantomimic plays of the Greeks and Romans. In the eighth century an emperor raised it to a sonorous status symbol of his power; only gradually did the Catholic church become its principal home. No other instrument of the West has been so strongly exposed to social and ecclesiastical appropriation and rejection.
That history is bound up with the individual history of the instruments on which Willem Tanke recorded these two works. For Reger’s variations he chose the Adema organ of 1923 in St Bavo’s Cathedral in Haarlem, with its four manuals and 81 stops; for his own fantasies he decided on the two Marcussen organs of the Grote of Sint Laurenskerk in Rotterdam — the side-aisle organ of 1959 for the first, the large organ of 1973 for the second. The choices were made on aesthetic grounds as much as on grounds of performing practice.
With the Variations and Fugue on an Original Theme Op. 73, Max Reger shows his mastery as an artist of musical variation. Complex in composition and difficult to play, the work consists of sixteen movements: a slow Introduzione, the presentation of his own theme in an Andante, thirteen variations and a fast closing fugue. That the theme is his own is stressed in the title — Reger otherwise often started from the themes of others, from Bach, Telemann, Mozart or the B-A-C-H motif. The Essen organist Gerd Zacher distinguishes four types of variation in Op. 73: figural variations, which remain in F sharp minor and grow faster from movement to movement; character variations with other keys, tempi and dynamics; “promenades”, in which the form of the theme dissolves and single motifs are freely spun on as interludes or echoes; and “contrasts”, in which the material is so altered that the theme almost disappears.
Tanke’s two Wind Fantasies are episodes about the historical breathing of the organ and about the breathing that happens in the audible moment — about the “wind”, the air fed by the bellows to the pipes, without which no note comes into being. The pieces thus also tell of the organ’s becoming, of its acoustic preconditions and its archetypal sound images. Fricke hears in them a precision and acoustic plasticity that, especially in the surround version, evoke an almost physical kind of listening: the organ as a widely breathing sound space, as wind become music. Tanke had already recorded his cycle Imaginary Day — 21 Fantasies for Organ for Cybele in 2005.
Willem Tanke, born in 1959, studied organ and improvisation with Jan Welmers, music theory with Joep Straesser and electronic music with Ton Bruynel at the Utrecht Conservatory and graduated in 1985 with the organ concert examination, with distinction. For his concert career he has specialised in Messiaen, the large works of Reger, contemporary Dutch music and improvisation; in 1994 he performed Messiaen’s complete organ works in Haarlem and in Mexico, and his complete recording on eight CDs was chosen “Star Recording” by the magazine The Organ. From 1988 to 2000 he held a professorship for organ in Utrecht. Reger’s variations were recorded on 7 June 2003 in Haarlem, the Wind Fantasies on 21 February 2003 in Rotterdam, at 24 bit and 96 kHz; the hybrid SACD runs to 72:15.