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Music open thread: Organ concertos [1]
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Date: 2025-04-22
Pope Francis was too frail to lead Mass at St. Peter’s on Easter Sunday, delegating that duty to Cardinal Comastri, but he did give one blessing.
My opinion of the recently deceased pontiff fluctuated when he was alive. At times, I thought he was the coolest, most progressive pope ever. At other times, he reminded me of why I'm skeptical of the concept of papal infallibility.
Many musical settings of the Catholic Mass are completely unsuitable for liturgical use, especially when written by composers who were not actually believers. For example, the Mša Glagolskaja by Leoš Janáček, written in the old church Slavonic decades before the Vatican authorized the use of local language for mass. After the Agneče Božij (Agnus Dei), there follows a significant organ solo in A-flat minor that has been described as “truly harrowing.”
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The blind pianist and organist Maria Theresia von Paradis is almost lost to history. Antonio Salieri wrote at least one concerto for her, his Concerto in C major for Organ and Orchestra. The soloist in the following recording is Tatyana Orlova, accompanied by the Kiev Kamerata conducted by Valery Matjuhin. Despite a few flubs, this is a convincing and committed performance.
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If you want to follow along with the score, you can watch this YouTube video. My edition that I put on IMSLP is married up with audio of the performance by Anton Gansberger accompanied by the Leondinger Symphonie Orchester conducted by Uwe Christian Harrer. As you can see in that video, score and parts are all available on IMSLP.
In this next video, just the finale played by 9-year-old Emily Thompson.
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Seeing the score was the first time I ever saw what I’m calling, for lack of a better term, “double cut time.” I’m sure you can put that in the Finale music notation software, but rather than figure out how to do that, I decided to simply change the time signature to 4/2.
Perhaps the most famous organ concerto is the one by Francis Poulenc. Here’s Iveta Apkalna with the hr-Sinfonieorchester conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada.
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Camille Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3 in C minor is most certainly not an organ concerto, though a case could be made to call it a sinfonia concertante, featuring not just organ but also piano 4-hands. I was hesitant to post a video of the whole symphony, so when I found this video of excerpts from a historically significant performance at Notre-Dame, I went with it.
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The open thread question: what is your favorite music with organ solos?
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