Yesterday I played on of the preludes from Bach's Well Tempered Clavier on the piano, with the intention of playing it as pianistically as I possibly can. That post is here: @primalamusica/playing-baroque-music-on-the-piano-authentic-or-pianistic. The post was in fact inspired by the interaction with @mipiano in reaction to one of her posts (@mipiano/cuauccln). As Bach never (well, apart from one composition) wrote music for the piano, it is intruiging to speculate how he would he composed if had written his music for the piano.
That Bach wrote for the organ goes without question. Yet, he wrote, of course, for the instruments of his day. Organs of later periods were build according to complete orther sound ideals than the Baroque one. So, again inspired by @mipiano, this time by her comment on my post, I tried to imagine the same prelude as if it were originally written for an organ from the French Romantic era.
Sadly, I do not own a sample set of one of the great French Romantic organs. Cavaillé-Coll was without dispute the most important organ builder from the French Romantic era, and the sample set I play here (of the Cavaillé-Coll organ in the St. Omer church in the city of St. Omer) is one of the earlier organs by Cavaillé-Coll and as such the traces of the Classical era and even the Baroque era are still very noticeable.
Nevertheless, it is a sound you wont get on a Baroque organ. Using only foundation stops and working the swell the result is very much unlike anything Bach could here during his live time. And the intruiging thing is that the music still sounds as if it were written for this kind of organ.
The recording was done with the Hauptwerk software and the sampleset, made by Sonus Paradisi, of the Cavaillé-Coll organ in the St. Omer church in the city of St. Omer (https://www.sonusparadisi.cz/en/organs/france/st-om.html).
