Customer Reviews

Traditions: C.B. Fisk Opus 106 Organ

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Dr. Susan Marchant is a brilliant woman to say the least - an organ oficionado, a flawless pianist, and a Yale graduate. Her performances on this CD are amazing, although PSU's hall isn't the best accoustically for an organ. However, Marchant makes the most of what she has and makes magic happen. A truly impressive disc.

An appealingly unhackneyed recital, benefiting from booklet annotations - by the organist herself - written in so attractive a style as to make you want to hear the disc right away. All the more severe, then, is the disappointment induced by the sonics. The engineers have captured this organ's ambience well enough, but that is just the trouble, because Pittsburg State University's hall is hopeless for almost all of this repertoire. It sounds as if the instrument was recorded in someone's potting shed, so dry and unforgiving is the acoustic, especially at any volume level above mezzo-piano. Only Bach's BWV653, a meditation (on the Lutheran chorale melody "An Wasserfluessen Babylon") so glorious as to be indestructible even in this aural environment, survives adequately (though one wonders why the pedal part's upper reaches are missing: is a different edition from the standard one being used?).

Susan Marchant's performances are for the most part fine (she conveys with particular skill the pitiless forward momentum of the Buxtehude and Sweelinck pieces), if rather cold (the Vierne and Franck have sounded much more luscious elsewhere, while Mendelssohn's elaborately notated phrasing in the Sonata's second movement goes largely ignored amid the prevailing uniform legato). Had the present CD been made in a more tonally opulent, or at least less tonally ugly, venue, it would have been worth seeking out.