Felipe Dominguez: A Baroque Christmas at Sono Luminus
Sono Luminus

In addition to being his first release on the label, Chilean/American Felipe Dominguez (b. 1983) holds the distinction of having recorded the first album on the Sono Luminus pipe organ at its Boyce, Virginia-based studio. On the fifty-minute release, Dominguez, an organist, harpsichordist, clavichordist, and musicologist and Brigham Young University graduate, presents a wide-ranging selection of baroque organ music associated with the Christmas season. In featuring material by J. S. Bach, Dieterich Buxtehude, Georg Böhm, Johann Pachelbel, and others, the compositions generally date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; they sound, however, as fresh as the day they were born, due in no small part to the resonant gleam of the organ's timbres.

You can't go wrong starting an album with Bach, and sure enough his “Nun komm der Heiden Heiland” (Oh, Come thou Saviour of the Gentiles) sets the mood strikingly with a walking bass supporting stately chorale melodies. Presented in two separate verses, Johann Gottfried Walther's own chorale prelude “Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, all zugleich” (Praise God, you Christians, All Together) is a tad livelier, the first part subdued and the glorious second exultant. Shifting the focus from Germany to France, Jean-François Dandrieu's "Noël cette Journée" (Christmas day today) evokes the French countryside with a sweetly melodic reverie anchored by a sustained pedal note. Moving now to Italy, Bernardo Pasquini's "Introduzione e Pastorale" opts for an even gentler though no less inviting kind of scene painting. Domenico Zipoli's "Pastorale" also conjures the vision of a serene country setting before an exuberant episode relocates it to a dance hall, a feel Dominguez perpetuates in following it with Jean-François Dandrieu's traditional French Noël "Michau qui causoit ce grand bruit."

The tone turns devotional for Johann Kaspar Ferdinand Fischer's ricercare on “Ave Maria Klare,” which uses a hymn for the Virgin Mary as source material, and regal for John Stanley's "Voluntary V," the latter enlivened by the organ's convincing simulation of a trumpet solo. The Christmas theme comes explicitly to the fore in the singing Yuletide melodies of Louis-Claude Daquin's "Noël Étranger" and the graceful lilt of the pifa from Handel's The Messiah. The longest piece and one of the album's most memorable is Buxtehude's “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern” (How Brightly Shines the Morning Star), an elaborate fantasia that uses its chorale melody as a launching pad for multiple variations of timbre, tempo, and dynamics. The album ends on a rousing high with two versions of the popular Christmas hymn “In dulci jubilo,” the highly ornamented treatment by Bach, composed in his youth, a prototypically dazzling affair.

If there's a problem with the album, it has nothing to do with musical content but instead a title that, while not inaccurate, is perhaps too circumscribing. While some of its pieces, most obviously Daquin's "Noël Étranger" and the one from Handel's The Messiah, are strongly associated with Christmas, Dominguez's release can be enjoyed and appreciated at any time of the year, and consequently the album might have been better titled A Baroque Offering at Sono Luminus or even A Baroque Season at Sono Luminus. On content grounds, however, there's nothing objectionable about this very appealing collection. The sound of the organ is never less than magnificent and Dominguez's renderings of the pieces unerring.

January 2023