About 15 years ago, when I was still a music student and not yet a corporate lawyer, I performed a full-faculty recital on the big Piet Visser organ at UT-Austin. The works I performed were Cesar Franck's Piece Heroique, Jean Langlais' Epilogue (Pedal Solo) from Hommage a Frescobaldi, and Dietrich Buxtehude's Praeludium et Fuga in g moll (BuxWV 149).

The Buxtehude piece was my favorite, perhaps because it was the most difficult to learn (and therefore the most rewarding to play). My professor had done a great deal of research on baroque ornamentation and performance practice, and we ended up playing the piece much more highly ornamented and quickly than most mainstream performers.

Although to my eternal regret I have no recordings of my live organ performances in my prime, I did create a contemporaneous "Switched on Buxtehude" version of the piece on my synthesizers which I transferred to mp3 a couple of years ago (to protect against damage or loss to the old audio cassette).

Download my recording here, and please let me know what you think. (The music is public domain, but the performance and recording are mine; please give me performance and arrangement credit if you reproduce it. Thanks!)

P.S. (Here are a couple of decent "traditional" - limited ornamentation - virtual performances using samples from real organs for contrast's sake).

Posted by: JohnL at 08:55 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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