Enfin, une collection de Noël définitive pour les organistes ! Ce nouveau livre offre 31 pièces festives par certains des meilleurs compositeurs avec préludes, dernier verset arrangements et musique pour orgue après le dernier verset 33 des chants populaires - certains dans deux clés - faire un pare-chocs totale de 150 pièces ! Tous sont facilement sight-readable, qui en fait un incontournable pour l'organiste occupé. / Orgue

The organ part and reduced score Symphony No. 4 - An Organ Symphony (2008) by Poul Ruders. Full score: WH31186 Orch. parts are available on hire: hire@ewh.dk Preface / Programme Note When introducing a large-scale symphonic work not only as a symphony but as an organ symphony it would be impossible not to think of and perhaps compare it with Camille Saint-Saëns’s famous SYMPHONY NO. 3 popularly known as the Organ Symphony. Well that is a risk I am prepared to take – and live with the consequences.Saint-Saëns however listed his work as a symphony avec/withorgan. The organ only appears in two out of the four sections of thepiece. In my symphony the instrument plays a far more significant part and is featured in all four movements. But it is not a concerto for organ and orchestra rather a symphony with organo obligato - a symphony with an organ part of a soloistic nature. So an Organ Symphony it is. The first movement PRELUDE is exactly that: a foreplay to what is in store for the rest of the symphony. It is slow (very slow!) and predominantly hushed: the organ and the orchestra wake up side-by-side getting to know one another.The second movement CORTÈGE is a slowly moving processional and it evokes extreme solemnity and austerity. Later on the music takes flight and the atmosphere lightens considerably a far more playful music emerging.This leads to the third movement ETUDE an exercise in instrumental virtuosity and technical challenge.The fourth and last movement is called CHACONNE but I could just as well have named it passacaglia (the definition of those two terms seems to blur even among the learned). Bearing in mind the last movement of Johannes Brahms´s SYMPHONY NO.4 which is universally agreed on as being a passacaglia I chose to avoid the Wrath of the Gods and opted for

?Mors et vita? death and life. This antithesis opens a stanza of the ancient 11th-century Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes where life and death are locked in mutual struggle. Zsigmond Szathmáry?s 12-minute composition of 2015 commissioned for the Freiburg Minster interprets this primal human experience with mighty explosions of sound. Here the organ can show what it?s capable of: its grandeur and strength are fully exploited but not at the expense of soft and gentle contrasts. Typical of Szathmáry?s compositional style is the alternation of seemingly improvised recitative-like writing and passages in strict rhythm. Time and again the composer takes upelements from the church hymn Christ ist erstanden von der Marter alle (Christ the Lord is risen again).