Choralvorspiel "O Gott, du frommer Gott" op. posth. 122 Nr. 7 (1896)

Aimez-vous Brahms – en tenue nord-américaine?
What do you do when you suddenly feel the need to play Brahms but still don't have a German-Romantic sample set at your disposal? My first thought was to go back to the Casavant organ from Bellevue, Washington, which I had come to appreciate as a marvel of stylistic transformation. A few days ago, however, I learnt about the amazing Æolian-Skinner organ at Redeemer Church in New Haven here on Contrebombarde.
I played Brahms' small chorale prelude on both instruments – and simply couldn't decide which version I liked better. This gave me the idea of placing these two organs side by side here and in my subsequent upload in order to reflect how my interpretative approach interacts with the respective instrument.
Brahms composed his Eleven Chorale Preludes op. 122 in 1896, a year before his death. Like the other pieces in the collection, "O Gott, du frommer Gott" is based on Baroque models: As in many chorale fantasies, the musical texture changes several times, whereby the entry of the cantus firmus in long note values is in the other, more animated voices always prepared by strictly derived motivic material. Brahms uses a lot of traditional means of expression (sighing motifs, false relations, dissonances, rhetorical pauses) - and in such a density that the piece takes on an unusually sombre, melancholy, simultaneously pensive and restlessly driven character.
It is therefore hard to believe that the composer shared the confidence of the choral text that God would grant the believer a "healthy body" and an "unharmed soul". Even in the last bars I do not hear a confident apotheosis, but rather a skeptical stoicism.
The Casavant organ with its pure tone colors allows for a very introverted, but at the same time almost otherworldly, serene performance. The Æolian-Skinner organ, on the other hand, opens up many possibilities to realize what a contemporary reviewer once called Brahms' "grey-on-grey painting dialectics".