This CD presents the organ of St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City, which is, according to the program notes, the largest in the Big Apple. The program starts and ends with transcriptions of two works normally heard with orchestra, and in between presents two works of symphonic proportions that are original organ pieces. Transcriptions have been a large part of the organ repertoire, especially popular around the early 1900’s. None other than Leopold Stokowski was an early organist and choirmaster at St. Bartholomew’s, where he played such orchestra favorites as Meyerbeer’s Coronation March. St. Bartholomew’s Aeolian-Skinner organ has all the colorful stops required to play such music. In fact, the Mussorgsky often sounds exactly like the Ravel orchestration and is perhaps the most successful work on the disc. The Copland fares less well, needing the hard attack that brass instruments can give to it. The two pieces written for organ are sensitively registered and played. The recorded sound is quite good, with a wide dynamic range and just the right amount of reverberation. If you have a subwoofer, anchor down your valuable pottery–there are some low tones here that will start everything shaking. The program notes, by the way, do not tell us who did the transcriptions of the Copland and Mussorsky, an unfortunate oversight.
