Distler: Organ Sonata

Just a brief note to tell you that I have posted my recording of Hugo Distler’s Sonata for organ on YouTube. It is from the May 2016 Choral Evensong, but I am only now getting around to preparing it and putting it online.

I am surprised that there are not more recordings of Distler’s organ music on YouTube. So far as I am concerned, he is the finest composer of organ and choral music in the German twentieth century. He did not live long enough to write a lot of music, which makes the things that we have all the more precious.

This work is a trio sonata, modeled more or less on Bach’s six Trio Sonatas (as opposed to, say, the organ sonatas of Mendelssohn, or the Classical era sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven).

It is an honor for me to play this, and his settings of Wachet auf and Nun komm der heiden Heiland. Most of his choral music is too hard for the choirs I have directed, but we have sung a few things. I would like to do more.