Tobias Frank Transcriptions françaises

‘Orchestrating at the organ’ — Marcel Dupré, one of the legendary personalities in the hall of fame of organ virtuosos, gave birth to this idea. And when twentieth-century virtuosos were underwhelmed by the 88 keys and three pedals that had been used by Franz Liszt, they needed a real cockpit. The console that Dupré created at his four-manual private organ in 1934 makes even captain Nemo’s imaginary console in Walt Disney’s Nautilus (20000 Leagues under the Sea) look rather minimal.
 
The young German organist Tobias Frank presents a kaleidoscopic programme that overflows with energy and features transcriptions by prominent figures of the French organ tradition, recorded at the luxuriously furnished four-manual organ at the Philharmonie Luxembourg (Karl Schuke organ builders, Berlin). Among other works, the disc includes Marcel Dupré’s transcriptions of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Sinfonia’ from the cantata ‘Wir danken dir Gott, wir danken dir’, of Alexander Borodin’s ‘Dans les steppes de l’Asie centrale’, and Jean-Paul Imbert’s ‘Montagues et Capulets’ from Sergei Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. At times profound and magnificently opulent, at others sensitive and restrained: a spell-binding experience!

Tobias Frank