Wilhelm Karges, Fantasia auff 2 Claviere
Four years ago I started publishing the compositions contained im manuscript Am.B. 340., owned by the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. It has been a lot of work deciphering the manuscript, creating scores, practicing the compositions and creating recordings. There are still 7 compositions left to publish and I intend to complete the work before the end of the year.
Of these 7 compositions, 5 are so called echo fantasias. That means that throughout the piece melodic fragments, played on a manual with a strong registration are repeated on a manual with a more soft registration. These kind of pieces were very popular in the seventeenth century. At least two of these 5 echo phantasias are based on an original composed by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, the other three are either oroginals by Karges himself, or based on an unknown original composition.
Echo phantasias are of course an ideal compositional form for the organ, with it’s many registration possibilities. They alsso tend to become a bit boring, which probably is the reason the compositional form died out after the secenteenth century.
The Echo Phantasy published today is a good example of the form and of the struggle to keep it interesting. The echoos are often varied and even deviate from the original call to make modulations to other tonalities possible. The echoos even swith hand from right handed echos in the outer parts, to left handed echoos in the middle part of the compositions.
The recording was done with the Hauptwerk software and the sampleset, made by Sonus Paradisi, of the Bader organ in the Walburgiskerk, Zutphen (https://www.sonusparadisi.cz/en/organs/netherlands/zutphen-virtual-organ-model.html). It’s almost 9 seconds reverbaration make it very suitable for echo phantasias.
Score
Karges, Fantasia auff 2 Clavier
Performance
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