Chorale prelude on "Wachet Auf, ruft uns die Stimme"

It's been a while since my last upload. My main Hauptwerk console at home has for months been troubled by intermittent faults which continue to elude me. Time - or, rather the lack of it - has been another factor.

Tonight I sat down to attempt a quick recording, only to be defeated again by the faults. The Great manual MIDI input kept dropping out (I thought I'd fixed that, but obviously not) and strange glitches kept appearing at random in the audio recordings. More troubleshooting lies ahead of me! However I did manage to capture a MIDI file which was able to be transferred to another computer running Hauptwerk, though without access to most of my licensed sample sets.

Then I thought - many parish organists here in Australia would love to have an instrument even half as resourceful as St Anne's Moseley. I know I would have revelled in a stoplist like that in my first church appointment back in 1974.

Here's a very quick recording of a manuals-only Advent chorale (yes I know I'm a bit late) by Walther, using the coupled manual principal choruses at St Anne's - first without then with the Great Mixture, and finally adding the Swell Trumpet. The foundation stop is the Great Small Open 8. Since I was only able to capture notes from the Swell manual I used the Master Couplers to create a "Great to Swell" coupler for this recording.

I grew up on the prolific editorial work of C. H. Trevor - mostly published by OUP and some are still available. This is from "Seasonal Chorale Preludes for Manuals Only" - Book 1 - first published in 1962.

This short but appealing work is deceptive as it's quite cunningly crafted in the various ways it uses the chorale melody.