Bach: L’Oeuvre Integrale Pour Orgue – Andre Isoir

   in Choir & Organ (Mar, 2019)
The late André Isoir, among his many musical testaments, leftus a complete Bach cycle, recorded for Calliope between 1975 and 1991 with the toccatas re-recorded in 1993. While the present re-release on 17 CDs gives us the opportunity to reconsider these performances, it would be folly to judge them in the context of today’s Bach interpretations; by now they are, definitively, ‘historic’. More valuable insights can be gained by considering Isoir in the context of his background, the zeitgeist of the era in which the recordings were made, and the Bach recordings of other French organists of the time.

And that time was, of course, a turbulent one. Isoir, like Marie-Claire …