New recordings of Romantic sonatas which were once a staple of the church organist’s repertoire, Josef Rheinberger’s organ sonatas are still overshadowed by Romantic-era composers for the instrument such as Liszt and Guilmant.

With a few exceptions, they are rarely heard in concerts today, regarded as ‘well-crafted’ but melodically uninspired and stylistically ‘out of date’.

For the German organist Christian von Blohn, however, Rheinberger’s sonatas include several outright masterpieces.

The cycle of 20 sonatas as a whole demonstrates a memorable engagement with the great organ composers of the past, as well as an ambition to mark out a new territory for the instrument within the Romantic era.

Von Blohn has accordingly taken a colourful approach to the crucial matter of registration, which Rheinberger left largely up to the individual player.

His performances reject the kind of thick textures with which these sonatas have become identified. While there are many individual highlights in the first four sonatas, such as the yearning Intermezzo of no.3 and the sweeping fugal movement of no.2, the Fifth Sonata announces a step up in scale and ambition towards the organ symphonies of Widor and Vierne.

Guilmant himself congratulated Rheinberger on the success of the Ninth Sonata (dedicated to him), and its elegiac Praeludium serves as an object example of Rheinberger’s underrated feeling for poetic song on the organ.

In his extensive booklet introduction, Christian von Blohn draws out the highpoints of each sonata and places them in the context of the composer’s long career. Rheinberger had intended to compose 24 sonatas, following the model of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, but his death in 1901, aged 62, brought the cycle to a premature halt with the vaulting paragraphs of no.20, which builds with undimmed energy towards a proudly march-like finale.

The recordings were made on the organ of the Josefskirche, St. Ingbert, a town to the east of Saarbrücken, and the booklet also includes a full specification for the instrument.