Today’s Video of the Day is an excerpt from the film Bach’s Missing Pages by Fugue State Films. It features Dutch organist Sietze de Vries who performs an improvisation on the chorale, Aus teifer Noth Schrei ich zu dir. This chorale is one of the many ‘gaps’ in J.S.Bach’s Orgelbüchlein (little organ book), originally intended to include 164 chorale settings to cover the entire liturgical calendar. However, with only 45 written and the rest either barely sketched out or not at all, completing the ‘Büchlein’ has been keeping scholars busy since the 18^th century.

Improvisation has long been an enduring component to the working organist – especially in Bach’s time, who was known to improvise voluntaries, chorale accompaniments and even fugues in line with what the service and congregation required. It seems apt then for de Vries’s completion of the chorales to draw upon this longstanding tradition of improvisation. The film, Bach’s Missing Pages features 45 new improvisations on the unwritten chorales as well as performances of all the pre-existing Bach settings.

A review of the film by Malcolm Riley featured in our September 2023 issue of Gramophone.

Bach’s Missing Pages is available now on DVD and digital from Fugue State Films and Gramophone readers can get a discount of 25% by using the code, gramophone25. Offer lasts until 1 November 2023.