A unique take on Mozart’s music from the organ loft.

Mozart wrote sparingly for the solo organ – a relatively early collection of short Epistle Sonatas for liturgical use, and later on a few more individual pieces for a new mechanical organ. In neither case was he using the full extent of a large instrument as exploited by his Baroque predecessors. At the same time, Mozart himself was no stranger to the organ loft; he would have been regularly playing the instrument at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna had his plans come to fruition and he had lived long enough to attain the post of Director of Music there.

Manuel Tomadin has imaginatively filled in this gap in the Mozart catalogue, as it were, with his own transcriptions of pieces particularly well suited to the soundworld of the organ. The A minor Sonata, K310, shares a surging, Sturm und Drang sensibility with the two Fantasias, in C minor and D minor. In turn this character lends itself to the Gothic grandeur of the ‘king of instruments’, when sensitively registered and nimbly executed. The coloristic possibilities of the organ, its dynamic range and effects of perspective, are also put to dramatic use in bringing to life two of Mozart’s opera overtures, from Così fan tutte and Die Zauberflöte.

Tomadin does not neglect the roots of Mozart’s music in the Baroque, with a transcription of the rococo G major Sonata, K283, which he wrote at the age of 18, plus a much less familiar Preludio and Capriccio in C, K394. In both of these pieces, Mozart was drawing on the legacy of CPE Bach, who had given him lessons as a child – a period to which Tomadin pays tribute with another rarity, one of the ‘London Sketches’ preserved in notebook form from the family’s stay in the English capital.

Tomadin has chosen an original and historically appropriate instrument for this fascinating exploration of Mozart on the organ, built in the late 1780s by the Montesanti firm for the parish church of Governolo in the province of Lombardy. The booklet includes a full specification of the organ, plus Tomadin’s own introduction to the repertoire and his approach to it as a transcriber and performer.