Can music tell a story? In the Baroque era, there was a firm belief. There was even a music rhetorical "system" by which the listener would be moved and convinced. Laurens de Man, winner of the Dutch Music Prize 2024, takes this idea as the starting point for this for several reasons fascinating album. De Man's exquisitely arranged movements from Bach's cantatas for organ are the most concrete
… examples of "speaking and sounding. The text offered the composer enough handles to make musical use of it. Kuhnaus Biblical sonatas and Bach's Capriccio about a traveling friend have more the quality of a symphonic poem avant le lettre. Kuhnaus rendition of the battle between David and Goliath (complete with sling and stone) became one of the most famous scenes in his Biblical sonatas. As the album progresses, the relationship between text and music becomes more abstract. Mozart originally composed his Fantasie KV 594 for Flöthenuhr. The piece was conceived as funeral music for the then recently deceased Field Marshal Ernst Gideon von Laudon. In the hands of Laurens de Man, on the other hand, it sounds like a real organ work. Kurtág's concise organ pieces from two centuries later seem an oddity. Yet these miniatures, too, tell a story. Kurtág conceived and played them as intermezzi on the Schola Hungarica's Gregorian album D'Adam à Abraham (not on musicweb.co.uk). Five of them ended up in the piano bunel Játékok and thus may be performed by others. These pieces also come into their own on the Contius organ completed in 2022 in the Leuven Church of St. Michael. (JWvR)more
