The ghost of Schweitzer hovers around this recording beyond the fact that it is dedicated to the Albert Schweitzer Institute for the Humanities. The programme includes, in the three chorale preludes, Schweitzer’s favourite Bach works, and the magnificent Arp Schnitger organ at Zwolle was one he himself played. More than that, though, Michael Murray’s performances are strongly influenced by, if not deliberately modelled on, Schweitzer’s style of Bach playing.
Schweitzer’s Bach was statuesque; the music placed on a plinth with every individual note painstakingly sculpted to derive maximum emotional and symbolic significance. The resulting performances unfold with a grandiloquence and weight quite at odds with the more matter-of-fact style of modern-day Bach playing. In the fugues this allows every detail to be clearly enunciated, the contrapuntal lines described with loving precision, and it certainly helps that Murray registers them lightly; the seven minutes it takes him to wend his way through that most intense of organ fugues (BWV540) would be pretty unbearable were it to be on the more customary, unrelenting pleno. On the other hand my personal preference is for the Toccata in F and D major Prelude to be more energetically expounded – they lose much of their effervescent character at these slow speeds. Murray himself doesn’t seem entirely at ease with the slow Toccata speed – this is not a flawless performance by any means.
The Zwolle organ can easily withstand such close scrutiny; indeed I suspect were Murray to sustain a simple minor triad for the generous 73 minutes this disc lasts one would not tire of its sound. Telarc have provided a splendid recording, although perhaps it’s a little too clean to be true – as if they had treated both instrument and building to a thorough disinfectant scrub before the recording sessions to expunge any hint of invasive rattles, squeaks, thuds or hisses.'