by Daniel Hathaway
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Akron’s Tuesday Musical has announced the 26 winners of its 2026 Scholarship Competition. “Nearly 130 applicants from 15 schools applied to compete this year for 30 scholarships ranging from $750 to $2,000 each and totaling a record-breaking $43,050.” Click here to read the article.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Three very different organist-composers to honor today: German Kappelmeister Johann Gottfried Walther who died in Weimar on this date in 1748, German Romantic composer Julius Reubke, born on March 23, 1834 in Hausneindorf, and French organist and composer Eugène Gigout, born ten years later in Nancy.
J.S. Bach’s cousin and almost his exact contemporary, Walther authored an important Lexicon, the first German-language encyclopedia of music, as well as some 132 organ works that include both elaborations of chorales and transcriptions of Italian orchestral concertos that were popular in Germany during his era.
His variations on Jesu, meine Freude are among his best. Listen here to a performance by Tom Anschütz on the 17th-century Hoffmann organ in Langenhain (near Frankfurt), rebuilt by Knauf in the 18th century, and by Kutter (ongoing) in 2020.
Walther’s Concerto el Signr. Meck is mislabeled — it’s actually a work by Vivaldi, but remains one of Walther’s most popular reworkings. Hear it played by Dutch artist Jacques van Oortmerssen on the organ at the Smarano Organ Academy in Italy, and then in an arrangement of an arrangement — for two marimbas, played by Marimbazzi, the young Polish percussion duo of Paweł Dyyak and Jakub Kołodziejczyk.
Reubke died at 24, which didn’t give this disciple of Liszt much time to compose, but he left two relatively monumental works to posterity. Listen to his Piano Sonata played by Austrian pianist Til Fellner here, and to his Sonata on the 94th Psalm played by American organist Nathan Laube here (at a Pittsburgh regional convention of the American Guild of Organists).
And two pieces stand out among French organist Eugène Gigout’s works for the instrument. His Toccata in b minor is quintessentially French (Jonathan Moyer plays it here on the organ at Cleveland’s Church of the Covenant), while his Grand Choeur Dialogué lends itself to various call-and-response echo treatments. Jonathan Scott plays it here in its original organ solo format on the Pascal Quorin organ at Évreux Cathedral, in Normandy, France.
And now the fun begins. If you have two players and two organs at your disposal, you can play it like Peter Eilander and Jaap Eilander do at the Laurenskerk in Rotterdam. If it’s just you and you have organs in multiple locations, you can arrange the work like Michael Hey did at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Or go all out and add brass and percussion as Michael Murray and the Empire Brass did in their over-the-top Telarc recording at Boston’s Church of the Advent.
