Brahms Complete Organ Works features Organist Tatiana Andrianova performing the composer’s organ music. This album was made to mark the 190th anniversary of his birth.

The great German composer Johannes Brahms is best known to wider audiences as the author of four symphonies, his Hungarian Dances, and chamber and piano music compositions.

His music for the organ is overshadowed by the composer’s other masterpieces, it rarely features in concerts and is seldom recorded. Nevertheless, organ compositions are a brilliant example of Brahms’ style which is characterised by complex polyphony, virtuoso improvisations and intimate, even confessional, narrative.

It is significant that Brahms turned to the ‘king of instruments’ both at the beginning and the end of his career. Between 1856 and 1857, as a young composer, he wrote polyphonic prelude and fugue cycles, as well as a separate fugue. In 1896, shortly before he died, he wrote a cycle of miniature choral preludes. His organ compositions thus represent significant stages in Brahms’ career.

Tatiana Andrianova, Organ