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Lovers of Bach are in for a pleasant surprise when they listen to this unique double CD of organ music played by Francis Monkman. The former member of Sky and Curved Air journeyed to Schloeben near Jena to record this CD Album on a recently restored Gerhard organ.

This collection of tracks adheres to the original Bach editions where possible and will create new and interesting detail to all lovers of Bach`s music. Included with this double CD collection is a comprehensive 32 page booklet of liner notes in English and German by FM.

As an introduction to the collection FM writes :

"I feel I have been preparing all my life for these recordings"

People have asked me, "why is it so difficult for you to choose between rock and classical -  on balance you must prefer one to the other?". But how could I give up the immediacy and vibrancy of not only a living artform (such pretensions rock used to have) but electric sound itself? Or, equally, give up a literature which contains some of the most beautiful music ever written on this planet? Instead, I have tried to bring a taste of what I felt to be the most essential, each to the other. To the idea of 'progression in rock', rather than blitz and bombast, I've applied the basis which lies behind all formal construction in so-called classical music - the evolving of structure out of the minimum thematic material, for the sake of maximum unity. That I have always tried to bring immediacy and vibrancy to what can so readily become a ritual "bleached as white as bones on the sands of time" (as the harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick put it, speaking of the "authentic" performance), can be judged from the following excerpt from the Telegraph's review of my 1976 South Bank harpsichord debut: "In Bach's Third Partita...his response to the virtuosity of the keyboard writing was uninhibited, yet the intellect was also in control of Bach's larger unfolding of structure. The result was spiritually as well as physically satisfying, with textures clear, impetus infectious." To my thinking, authenticity starts inwardly, an adherence at all costs to one's musical concept - but historical authenticity also has its place, primarily as a springboard for that leap of the imagination into the unknown, the knowledge of a secure basis in fact. Its devotees will find no shortage here - an instrument of Bach's time (begun in 1749, the last year of his life - although not restored until 2003), from a builder who may well have been apprenticed at the Weimar workshop of the Trebs family - so well known to Bach himself; the use of facsimile (at least, for Clav.III), involving an observance of the minutiae of discrepancies in detail that editors see as their job to suppress, but which frequently turn out (or so it seems to me) to have no little musical - even extra-musical - significance; and, not least, the employ of Bach's own method of playing, for centuries known as the only means of articulating individual lines in a polyphonic texture on keyboard, but now almost entirely forgotten - in Germany I was told "why bother with such details?". The listener may judge whether such details are unimportant.

Most revelatory of all - to me - is the sound itself. First, as the nearest 'acoustic' experience to standing in front of a 100W stack (you can imagine, this was the sort of organ tone I'd never dreamed possible), but especially for something even more undreamed of, that in timbre and envelope - even harmonic envelope - some quality of 'string synthesis', in the tone of the full organ, could have been planned and designed into the sound. Perhaps traces of this effect can be heard on some of the mp3 clips (tho not chosen for that purpose - I'm sure it's far more pronounced elsewhere). It seems Bach, and his friends, knew how to do everything! Actually, the concept of the keyed string synthesizer is older still - the early 17th century 'Geigenwerk'...

My dearest wish is that lovers of Bach everywhere should enjoy these CDs. If 1/4 as much as I have, they are in for a pleasant surprise!

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