Four stirring organ arrangements on hymns for Holy Week have been gathered for this collection: All Glory, Laud and Honor (Palm Sunday)- Beneath the Cross of Jesus (Maundy Thursday)- Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed with O Sacred Head, No Wounded (Good Friday)- and Crown Him with Many Crowns (Easter). The pieces work as preludes, offertorys, postludes or even concert pieces, in sequence or individually. / Orgue

'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 Szathmary'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 Szathmary's compositional style is the alternation of seemingly improvised, recitative-like writing and passages in strict rhythm. Time and again the composer takes up elements from the church hymn 'Christ ist erstanden von der Marter alle' (Christ the Lord is risen again). / Orgue

Par HERCHENRODER MARTIN. 'Toccata and Lament” was composed on commission in 2008 to inaugurate the large new organ in the Christ Church Cathedral, Rochester, NY, USA. This instrument is a detailed reconstruction of a late Baroque organ of 1776 from Vilnius in Lithuania. The point of departure - a clash of contrasting eras and musical cultures on two continents - already bodes excitement. Martin Herchenröder, a composer and professor of music theory, has incorporated these contrasts in his roughly eight-minute composition. The result is a musical idiom of rare distinction, universal in its musical resources and alternating between tonal triads and extremely dissonant clusters. The heart of the piece is a dirge which, using the Baroque doctrine of the affections, relates to Eastern European cultural history in and around Vilnius, a history marked by the predations of 20th-Century war./ Répertoire / Orgue