Gerhard Weinberger - Reger: Organ Works, Vol. 7 (2021)

At long last the successful Reger Edition of CPO continues on its way. The critics have been more than enthusiastic about the previous releases, and Musik & Theater even stated: “These recordings number among the best currently available in the field of Reger’s organ music”. This seventh volume is featuring Reger’s five easy-to-play Preludes and Fugues, Op. 56.

Although the composer termed this composition “an organ work of small caliber” in a letter to the publisher Lauterbach & Kuhn, the critics reacted positively, and the organist and composer Robert Frenzel numbered its pieces, which form anything but a secondary work, “among the most poetic phenomena in the most recent organ literature”. The generic combination of “Prelude and Fugue” is frequently assigned to the realm of so-called absolute music, but Reger’s Op. 56 does not seem to belong to this world in which only the musical structure is of significance; instead, particularly the preludes, which mostly practice dynamic moderation – like many of the “pieces” from Op. 59 and other works – are distinguished by a pronounced poetic character.