Petr Eben has written so much organ music that there’s a risk that he’ll be thought of as interesting mainly to the specialist organ public. In fact his musical language, though tonally and harmonically adventurous, is readily accessible, and his use of the instrument is often spectacularly virtuoso and vividly colourful; even those who think they don’t much care for organ music could well find his work exciting and impressive. Especially, I suppose, if they are receptive to religious ideas: all four of the Laudes, each based on a Gregorian melody, are conceived as gestures of gratitude to God, while the eight movements of the Job cycle are Christian meditations on the Old Testament story. Indeed Eben uses virtuosity and his remarkable command of the instrument’s resources to ‘dramatise’ his subject matter. In the fourth movement of Job, for example, the cumulation of his sufferings is suggested by an insistent passacaglia figure over which a strikingly inventive, vividly turbulent toccata conveys mounting desperation. In the preceding movement, portraying Job’s refusal to reproach God for his misery, tormented agitation gives way to an extended chorale prelude on a serene melody used several times by Bach.
The treatment is, of course, in Eben’s own manner, but for all his use of cluster-like chords and unconventional registrations that manner includes an encyclopedic memory of the instrument’s past. This is most obvious in Hommage a Buxtehude, where two brief fragments of the object of Eben’s homage (one of them rather Eben-like in its quirky repeated notes) form the basis of two fugues enclosed by three athletic (and, in the case of the third, flamboyantly showy) toccatas. No organ could have been better chosen for this music than the massively sonorous, brilliantly colourful instrument at the Hedvig Eleonora Kyrkan in Stockholm; Halgeir Schiager, a new name to me, is a player of dazzling technique and the recording is wonderfully spacious.'