This 6-CD set present the complete keyboard music (organ and harpsichord) of Holland’s most famous composer: Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck.

Born within a couple of years of each other, Gottfried Silbermann and Johann Sebastian Bach were acquainted, and we know that Silbermann in 1736 invited the composer to inaugurate the new organ that he had built in Dresden’s Frauenkirche. That instrument was destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945, but some thirty of Silbermann’s organs are still extant. From robust pedal stops providing a sturdy bass fundament to silvery flute stops, his instruments were famous for their distinctive&&& sound and contemporary sources often made use of a play on the name of their maker as they praised their ‘Silberklang’.

The talented organist and harpsichordist Maud Gratton is an artist constantly seeking perfection. A graduate of the Paris Conservatoire, she trained with such great masters as Pierre Hantaï (harpsichord) and Louis Robilliard (organ), as well as with Olivier Baumont, Blandine Rannou, Kenneth Weiss, Michel Bouvard, Olivier Latry, and Olivier Trachier.

A child wonder who stirred the admiration of the court, Dandrieu was a virtuoso harpsichordist but above all, organist of the Royal Chapel of Versailles from 1721. He left a corpus of work of a rare inventiveness tracing out the chapel's most dazzling musical moments under the reign of Louis XV. Here are 'Magnificats', pieces for Christmas and some splendid hallmark scores that offer snapshots of the liturgical art of the king's organist at the height of the French Baroque. Dandrieu, writes for organ the equal of the harpsichord masterpieces of his time. Jean-Baptiste Robin, organist of the Royal Chapel of Versailles, makes the great organ ring with majesty, thanks to a decade of close familiarity with this historic instrument.

The complete organ works by Walther! Johann Gottfried Walther (1684-1748, a near contemporary of Bach) spent the major part of his life as the organist of the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Weimar, where he also was teacher of the Duke of Weimar. He formed a close friendship with Johann Sebastian Bach, of whom he was a second cousin. Walthers organ music may be divided into a large corpus of Chorale settings, in which he followed the tradition of Bach, and the transcriptions of fashionable concertos by composers like Telemann, Albinoni, Torelli, Vivaldi, Gentili and many others.

Buxtehude’s anthology and some of the most beautiful pages of North German repertory.

Marcel Dupré had a long and busy career as a recitalist, composer, teacher, writer and editor and he exerted enormous influence on all aspects of the organist's art in the early part of this century. Dupré's place in the evolution of twentieth century organ music has yet to be fully understood or appreciated and there are those who would seek to detract from the enormous impact his playing and teaching had on countless students who studied with him. It cannot be ignored that the list of his Premier Prix students at the Paris Conservatoire contains nearly every important twentieth-century French organist and composer, including Marie-Claire Alain, Jean Langlais, Jean Guillou, Jeanne Demessieux, and Olivier Messiaën.

Like Korngold, Toch, Schoenberg, Zeisl and Zemlinsky, Richard Stöhr (1874-1967) was one of many Austrian composers driven into American exile by the Nazis. His generous output of music, being rediscovered at last in these Toccata Classics recordings, includes seven symphonies, much chamber music, songs, and choral and piano pieces. His output for organ is not extensive, but its quality is high: the instrument plays an important role in a number of Stöhr’s orchestral works, and here Stöhr presents the organ in two thoroughly attractive duos and an imposing solo sonata. The Sonata and Intermezzi sit downstream from Brahms in the tradition of Viennese classicism; the chromatic touches in the later Suite lean towards the language of Korngold.

The large-scale Het Sweelinck Monument project, with Harry van der Kamp as its driving force, and with individual issues on Glossa over the last 6 years in book-CD format for the Netherlands and as multiple-CD sets for the international market, embraces the complete vocal and instrumental music output of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck.

For his first CD with La Dolce Volta, Olivier Latry has chosen a programme devoted to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. This recording, made on the massive Cavaille-Coll organ of Notre-Dame de Paris, of which he is titular organist, raises a number of fascinating questions.

The organ works of Gottlieb Muffat (1690-1770), imperial court and chamber organist in Vienna since 1717, are based on the classical genres, which Muffat, however, knows how to skilfully combine with the musical language of his time. His most important organ works remained unprinted during his lifetime and have only survived in copies, thanks in part to the Viennese Minorite Father Alexander Giessel. Only in recent years has his collection been made accessible in a modern edition, which Jörg-Andreas Bötticher has recorded here for the first time. The three organs of the monastery church of Muri in the canton of Aargau, which are among the best preserved baroque organs in Switzerland, were at his disposal.