What is the purpose of a particular – or any – recording? Is it documentation? information? entertainment? publicity? Is the composer, the repertory, the performer, the interpretation, the instrument, the venue, or something else ( the bottom line? ) the most important thing? Is it meant to experiment, to exist in dialogue, to reach an audience, to have repercussions for live performance, to be a monument in itself? The answers to ( or consideration of ) questions like these should inform every recording project and every review.
It’s fine to note the ways in which a given instrument may not be the most ‘authentic’ to the featured repertory. This may be particularly important when the performer or packager has made some claim that it is. We all do well to note that we have precious few unaltered organs of perhaps any era and that the extant and famous French or Spanish ( or English or Dutch or German ) organs of, say, the mid-to-late eighteenth century may be farther than we realize from, say, the sound-worlds of the great composers of the seventeenth century ( the same goes for twentieth-century alterations of nineteenth-century organs with regard to the Romantic repertory, and so on ). At the same time, I don’t think the exact historical-geographical connection of organ to music is necessarily the most important criterion; certainly it is not possible in the day-to-day world ( see above regarding the purposes of recording, and think of Mendelssohn in England or French organists touring the US ). Rather, we might ask, is the instrument expressive? colorful? charming? compelling? can you hear the musical lines? does it seem to have the right amount or kind of brightness, depth, heaviness, transparency, sweetness, articulateness, whatever, for the music? Has the performer used it in ways that seem to understand both instrument and music, and to make a connection between them, with whatever it is that makes for good taste?
It’s also fine to mention the booklet, but should it factor into the rating of a recording? Most CD booklets are relatively poor in various ways. Unless the documentation of a particular instrument is the main purpose of a recording, is it necessary to include registration lists – or even an organ stoplist, when so often such is available online – or right to complain if they are not provided? Granted that registration is, or can be, a part of the interpreter’s art, to varying degrees, does a focus thereupon contribute to the idolization of instrument ( or performer ) over music? The same goes for performer biographies: are they really important – unless one has a need to check their credentials, which is more than a bit like turning over the china? Finally, poor translations are sometimes laughable, sometimes actually unclear or misleading ( the English versions of the essays in the Breitkopf Scheidt edition come to mind ). But as a professor of mine once said, your lack of the language in which a source is written is not the source’s problem: it’s your problem.
Complete-works recordings are so common that we take them for granted, and possibly they have their place. Nevertheless they should be much more often and more stringently critiqued, not least because so few organists seemingly have the musicianship ( or perhaps, to be more generous, the opportunity ) to develop and sustain equally committed, probing, and compelling interpretations of a composer’s complete œuvre across seven, ten, fifteen discs. Beyond this, we should at least be asking whether anyone’s complete works – assuming we can even delimit them – are actually worth recording. In the case of composers’ works which constitute one or more groupings of similar pieces, we should ask: Were the works ever meant to be heard in one sitting? Were they published or collected as a set, and if so, is a recording of the set a suitable analogue? What kinds of variety are appropriate to seek in recording a number of works of similar type, whether grouped in the source or not? What might inform such variety: verbal text ( if any – and if this is deemed actually relevant )? Modality or tonality? Whim? The desire to demonstrate a particular instrument, or to experiment with different presentations? On the other hand, is an archival or reference recording of a set of works, not seeking artificial variety and not particularly meant to be listened to straight through, necessarily bad?
What might the alternatives to complete-works or complete-sets recordings be? Is it possible to place the organ works in the context of a liturgy? of other works in the same manuscript? of music known to be in the same institutional library, or influencing or influenced by the composer or particular work? We see some examples of all of these approaches in recordings and, from time to time, in editions; perhaps moreso in live performance. For organ music, so much of which is liturgical in intent and original context, this seems particularly useful, if almost necessarily more complicated.
Finally, how much does any of this matter in the age of streaming?