Matthew Owens Flentrop Organ of Dunblane Cathedral
77:45
resonus RES10347
The third volume in this complete organ works by Johann Pachelbel (1653- 1706), the well-known organist in the generation before Bach who taught Johann Sebastian’s elder brother Johann Christoph, is of the same high standard as the two earlier volumes. This time the excellent Matthew Owens, a former organ scholar at Queen’s College, Oxford where he recorded his first volume in this series on James Dalton’s famous Frobenius, plays an organ of a similar style – though much larger, and so able to deliver a wider range of registrations in, for example, the Magnificat Fugues and the Aria from Hexachordum Apollonis 1669 (misspelt on p. 3 of the booklet). We continue to have the details of his registration for each track in the liner notes as we had in volume 2, which is a welcome aid to understanding Owens’ interpretation of (especially) the quarti toni Magnificat fugues and the Hexachordium aria and variations.
Anyone who wants to hear how very accomplished Owens’ playing is needs to go no further than track 3, where the very slightly unequal phrasing of the fugue subject gives shape and life with a minimal registration to what appears on the page to be a very simple subject. For the rest, Pachelbel’s 17th-century style (with its less complex choral preludes than Bach’s) is well served by this Flentrop with its large number of richly coloured ranks at both 4’ and 8’ pitch, as is more characteristic of middle and southern Germany. It is tuned however as you might expect in equal temperament, which means that the rarely used tierce ranks (as in track 8) have less ringing bite than if the Dunblane Flentrop had been tuned in a more 17th-century temperament with perfect thirds.
But I enjoyed Owens’ playing, and this series will continue to be an invaluable addition to the Pachelbel archive. We have just learned that the next two volumes are both scheduled to be recorded on the Metzler in Trinity College, Cambridge and I look forward to that greatly.
David Stancliffe