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| Franck turned to writing organ music only in his thirties, prompted not least by his appointment as organist at the Parisian Basilica Ste-Clotilde in 1858, a post he held until his death. He had played the organ at smaller churches in Paris before; the Six Pièces date back to that time and his first years at Ste-Clotilde; the core piece, Prélude, Fugue et Variation op. 18, with its extraordinary structure including a fugue as the central part, is dedicated to Camille Saint-Saens. Pastorale is dedicated to the famous organ builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811-1890); on the occasion of the inauguration of the Cavaillé-Coll Organ at the Palais du Trocadéro Franck wrote his Trois Pièces (1878) with their hymnic finale, the Pièce Héroique. True to his 1889 announcement that before his death he meant to compose three organ chorals 'like Johann Sebastian Bach but entirely different,' Franck actually completed his Trois Chorales within a very short time in September 1890. And they were, indeed, to be his last compositions: on 8 November 1890 Franck died of the injuries he suffered from a collision with a horse-drawn omnibus. Christoph Maria Moosmann's interpretation of Franck's complete organ works is both musically and technically no less than perfect. |
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| Recommendation |
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This album about boredom takes the Musicbanda Franui, accompanied by actor Peter Simonischek, away from their daily routine, back to the days of their childhood, and straight on to the graveyard.  |
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| What a cheek! So Wolfgang Mitterer can do that, too: and writing a children’s opera really is no picnic, with or without jam. (Or flies.) |
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| “The Raft of Piano Keys”: Hans Werner Henze’s complete works for piano, between Mediterranean impromptus and the search for lost time. |
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