A quartet of German Baroque masters at their most daring and outlandish, exploring the harmonic quirks of mean-tone temperament on the organ.

Manuel Tomadin has assembled an impressive library of Baroque-era albums on Brilliant Classics, including critically acclaimed surveys of Bach and comprehensive documents of the surviving output of lesser-known names such as Christian Erbach and Vincent Lübeck. ‘A very attractively conceived and well-executed Bach organ recital disc,’ noted Fanfare of Manuel Tomadin’s diverse recital (95786): ‘All recital discs should be this thoughtfully conceived and well done; cordially recommended.’

In the same vein, this new recording leads the listener through both unfamiliar and well-known names and works, drawing out the original meaning of the term Baroque as ‘the broken pearl’ – something strange and exquisite. At a time before the ‘even-tempered’ system of tuning homogenised the spaces between different intervals – some of them being narrower or wider than others in what is known as ‘mean-tone’ temperament – composers such as Buxtehude might exploit those idiosyncrasies to produce harmonies which were deliberately awkward or dissonant. Manuel Tomadin has chosen the Praeludium in E major, BuxWV141, the Praeludium in F sharp minor, BuxWV146, and a chorale prelude, Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist, BuxWV208, to illustrate this point.

The most unfamiliar name here is Johann Heinrich Buttstett (1666-1727) – Capellmeister in the central-German town of Erfurt – who defended conservative theories of musical evolution as a writer and teacher, but also produced works which sound quite radical for their time, such as an extensive Praeludium and Canzona in D minor.

J.S. Bach is represented here by a pair of organ preludes and fugues (BWV534 in F minor and BWV547 in C major) from his Weimar period – relatively early in his career, but no less experimental for that. The search for harmonic extremes was continued by the most radically inventive of his sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Manuel Tomadin demonstrates this continuity with the chorale prelude ’Ich ruf zu dir’. A fascinating and unique collection, performed on the authentic and historically significant Hinsz organ of 1738 at the Broederkerk in the Dutch town of Kampen.