Max Reger’s Bach transcriptions for organ have little to do with the style and spirit of the composer’s original works for the instrument. The Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue and the B-flat minor Prelude and Fugue take on colorful sonorities and dynamic extremes that reflect late-19th-century values. While Sigfrid Karg-Elert’s “Air on the G-string” arrangement sounds relatively restrained in this context, the blended stops and melting legato hardly conform to early 21st-century notions of baroque performance practice. But what a hypnotic, gorgeously controlled performance Arturo Sachetti delivers, just the same.
By contrast, the piano’s tumultuous tremolos and runs in Liszt’s St. Francis Walking on the Water lose their stormy impetus via Reger’s slow-motion organ recasting, and Karg-Elert’s static-textured take on Schubert’s Ave Maria borders on kitsch (the corny, cocktail-like melodic grace notes, for example).
Sachetti plays the two Wagner Preludes in a straightforward, sober, Sunday morning preluding manner that minimizes the music’s theatrical origin, but his superb legato phrasing and imaginative registrations in Gebet underline Wagner’s harmonic impact on Wolf’s style. The “Ponziano Bevilacqua” organ in Florence’s Chiesa della Divina Provvidenza serves this repertoire well. So do the clean and clear engineering and, of course, Sachetti’s caring interpretations.
