Fantasia, Adagio and Fugue in C major

 

Fantasia, Adagio and Fugue in C major - (2011)    

for organ

for Barry Jordan, Magdeburger Dom

 

My college friend, Manuel Rosales, was invited to advise on and voice the new smaller organ in the Magdeburg cathedral's Remter.

 

 Remter is an older word equivalent to the Latin, refectorium, and the room was at one time the large, vaulted dining hall of a cloister. The room is now used for worship in addition to the cathedral itself, and a new organ of 22 stops was commissioned to be built by Glatter-Götz Orgelbau in Owingen, and voiced with the expert ears of Manuel. The booklet detailing the work mentions specifically the concept was for an instrument capable of clear Baroque, contrapuntal speech. I visited Manuel and Stefan twice, and had a chance to see the work and the other instruments there. Barry Jordan was kind enough to give me a short tour of the second "Paradise" organ in the cathedral itself, after I had lunched with Manuel and Stefan and auditioned the new two-manual instrument being built and voiced.

 

In contrapuntal tradition, the main theme of the work as at measure five is announced in the left hand, and then begins to move through the range of the instrument. The voice leading moves quickly through Lydian and Aeolian harmonic colors relating to the tonic of C major.

 

 

The adagio section is lightly imitative, moving from dominant to sub-mediant regions as an episode away from the bright tonic of the piece.

 

 

The theme then is treated as a fugue subject, moving across the range of the instrument, and in the final statements the pedal takes the major part in restating the theme fortissimo.

 

10 pages, circa 8' 15"  - MP3 demo is here  

 

 

Manuel Rosales, Barry Jordan, Stefan Stürzer and the composer in Magdeburg

 

Barry Jordan studied at the University of Cape Town, earning his Bachelor of Music (1979) and Master of Music in composition (1985), was organ scholar at St. George’s Cathedral (Anglican), and studied thereafter at Vienna's Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst, and in Lübeck studying with Martin Haselböck, then assistant to Hans Gebhard at Kiel's church of St. Nikolai and later Kantor and Organist of the Osterkirche, thence appointed Organist and choral director of Magdeburg Cathedral in 1994, receiving the 2004 he received the honorary title of Kirchenmusikdirektor in 2004. For more about Jordan and his music programs, see his pages on the Magdeburger Dom website, click here.

 

Fantasia, Adagio and Fugue in C major