The International Historical Organ Recording Collection

This is the 20th release and to celebrate this I’ve chosen different works by J. S. Bach played by five different organists. As you can see, there are two duplicates; the Alfred Sittard and Fernando Germani have already been released (IHORC-02 and IHORC-11) but the transfer was made from other 78rpms which are of a quality worth presenting here. Looking back over the 20 releases here on IHORC, it’s very clear that recording organ works J. S. Bach for an organist of that period was standard, and the repertoire is quite broad. Of course there are numerous versions of the famous Toccata and Fugue in d minor, but about all genres of his organ works are represented here in some form or another. All the organists tried their hands on the “big ones”, but they also ventured into the more elusive parts of his organ production, e.g. Heitmann recorded the “Kunst der Fuge”, Walcha the “Schübler Chorales” (on the other hand Walcha has recorded the complete works twice, so he is a little out of the...

This is the second, but hopefully not the last, release with Fritz Heitmann. On May 19th in 1950 Fritz Heitmann recorded parts of J. S. Bach’s Kunst der Fuge in the Gruft-Kapelle in the Berliner Dom. This recording was afterwards released on an LP on the German Telefunken label. Again we are faced with a impressive display of organ playing. This recording was made in just one day, and that required quite an amount of work and technical precision in a time when cutting and splicing was still very limited. The cathedral was heavily damaged in 1944, and among other things the entire dome was destroyed. A temporary roof was set up in 1953 and until then the cathedral was unusable. Church services and other activities were held in the crypt under the cathedral. Historically speaking this recording must have been very emotional. It was recorded in 1950, so it was made when the cathedral was still in a terrible condition with much damage due to weather and vandalism. I’m not sure, but as I r...

Here is another great release from The European Archive ( http://europarchive.org/ ). This time it’s Fritz Heitmann playing excerpts from J. S. Bach “Dritter Teil” at the Arp-Schnitger organ in Eosander Chapel at Charlottenburg Castle in Berlin. One very interesting thing is that this organ was destroyed during the Second World War in 1944, so this is the only sound document of this organ. I’ve searched for some information on Heitmann and found a little on the German Wiki: Fritz Heitmann (1891-1953) war ein deutscher Organist. Erste Ausbildung bei seinem Vater, der ebenfalls Organist war. Dann besuchte Heitmann das Hamburger Konservatorium für Musik und von 1909 - 1911 war er am Leipziger Konservatorium Schüler von Karl Straube, Max Reger und Josef Pembaur. Als Organist von 1912 bis 1914 am Dom in Schleswig tätig, dann von 1918 bis 1932 an der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche und seit 1919 zugleich an der Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, schließlich von 1932 bis zu seinem Tode Domorganist am B...