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Joseph P. Farrell posted an update 7 years, 8 months ago
A nice performance of the Passacaglia and (double) Fugue here… almost the equal of Biggs’, but in this case you can watch it being played:
The Giza Forum (Legacy)
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The importance of organ shoes….
His hand technique looks very unusual to me. It seems almost as if he isn’t even using his thumbs. I understand in the early Baroque and before that thumbs weren’t used when playing keyboard, but wasn’t it precisely J.S. and C.P.E. Bach who pioneered and codified the use of all ten digits on keys? (At least to me, the handful of JSB pieces I dabble in don’t seem humanly possible to play without using the thumbs.)
That’s one theory… another is that they seldom used heels (given some of the pedal boards were short), but as far as I recall, most of the pedals boards on the organs (and pedal harpsichords) that JS, WF, and CPE Bach actually played were long like the modern ones. The plain fact of the matter is, there’s no set way (technically speaking) of playing any given piece, as that will depend on doing whatever it takes to get through it and survive… lol. It also depends on the instrument. Wargh is using the combination studs and pistons a great deal, which the Bachs did not have, but I strongly suspect they certainly would have used them had they had them. Had JS Bach been born late enough to experience a Cavaille-Coll organ, he probably would have been in organists’s heaven.
In the double fugue, the left hand at the very beginning of the piece IS written that way into the score. Plus he’s using what organists sometimes call the “third hand”, playing the middle voices with the free inner digits of both hands. It’s very difficult.