The four pieces that open the album are grouped by Blarr as Vier Tänze (Four Dances). Holy Tango III “An Himmelfahrt” is intended as a memorial to the Teschemacher organ of 1763, which burnt during the Second World War in the Lutheran church on Bergerstraße in Düsseldorf; the lowest C sharp was missing from that instrument’s pedal. The outer sections are based on the Reformation chorale Christ fuhr gen Himmel, the middle section takes up an Arabic melody Blarr heard in the old city of Jerusalem on 8 August 2008 — a muezzin’s cantillation strikingly similar to a Polish folksong from the Beskids. The piece later entered his Ascension Oratorio as an organ solo, premiered in Saalfeld on 5 September 2010.
Dem Intendanten GG — Mephistowalzer mit Ave Maria is an homage to Gustav Gründgens, who directed the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus after the war and shaped the city’s cultural climate. Its starting point was Gründgens’s rhythmic delivery of the song in Auerbach’s cellar, his scat singing “jam pa pa pa pa pam” in brisk waltz time; as a counterpoint comes the Ave Maria by Jacques Arcadelt, overlaid with accelerating bell sounds until the waltz intensifies to “delirante”. Martin Schmeding played the original organ version in 2007 on the Felix Mendelssohn Europa organ in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel; for this recording Blarr wrote a new, provisionally final version. There follow Something like a blues — remembering George Maycock and the Estampie II as a pedal solo, based on an organum fragment from the Robertsbridge Codex and carrying a verse from Psalm 122 in its title.
The Drei Albumblätter are dedications: the first to Helmut Schmidt, the second, as Quasi una Tarantella, to the organist and scholar Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini in Bologna, the third, as Quasi una Sardana, to Gregori Estrada at Montserrat. The Fünf Intonationen of 2014 are short pieces of one to two and a half minutes each, referring to numbers of a larger cycle — Exodus, Trostlied, Der siebte Engel, Kaddish.
The album closes with Der Bachpokal, an introduction, passacaglia and chorale “as an organ test in honorem Zacharias Hildebrandt” of 2007. The passacaglia, at almost twelve minutes, is the longest movement here; the title alludes to the organ builder whose instruments Bach had to examine, and to the goblet with which a successful organ test was toasted.
Martin Schmeding plays the Rieger organ of 1965 and the organ positive built by Lukas Fischer for the Neanderkirche in 1992; the composer himself takes part in some pieces. The recording was made from 2 to 4 March 2017 in the Neanderkirche Düsseldorf, in stereo, 5.1 surround and 3D binaural stereo. The total playing time is 66:45; the 44-page booklet contains Blarr’s own commentaries on every piece.