WILLIAM RUSSELL, Twelve Voluntaries for the Organ or Pianoforte (Set 1末1804); Twelve Voluntaries for the Organ or Pianoforte (Set 2末1812). fagus-music.com, Beech Cottage Drumoak Banchory AB31 5AL, (Tel. 01330 811363). 2 vols., ｣15 each.
The British publisher fagus-music.com has performed an invaluable service in issuing these works, which have previously been fully available only in a privately printed facsimile. Russell died young, but made a major mark in the English organ school through these, his only published keyboard works, which exhibit the wide breadth and scope of his extensive professional experience. Each voluntary is a multipartite work with a compelling sense of forward motion from one movement to the next; the mastery of harmony and rhythm is evident throughout, in the sureness of sequences, the ingenious phraseology, and in many surprise modulations; the composer appreciates the expressive characteristics of the various keys, and each book traverses all the common major and minor keys with obvious delectation. But the real revelations lie elsewhere: first, in the strength of the fugue writing, wherein at least half-a-dozen voluntaries in each book culminate in rousing, often lengthy fugues, in which the essential harmonic nature of this genre is laid bare without a trace of academic, or "species" counterpoint; and secondly, in the enormous progress manifested during the years between Sets 1 and 2. Any music of this period necessarily invites an unfavorable comparison with the most esteemed of the old masters, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, but末contrary to frequent misassociations末they did not compose music for organists. If Russell's 1804 voluntaries sound and feel like traditional keyboard music, the 1812 set takes on an almost monumentally enlarged scope, and even in the fugues, one feels that the active impulse is no longer merely keyboardistic, but symphonic. Yet, again, there is hardly a trace of formal stricture, and such artificial divisions as in the so-called "principal and subordinate" themes, for example, are nowhere to be found. Editor Geoffrey Atkinson does not touch upon origin or chronology in his informative and well-organized notes, but it is apparent that Russell's primary audience was the knowledgeable community of English music professionals and connoisseurs末from whom he drew an initial subscribership of over 200. The designations "for organ or pianoforte" should be taken as mere practical concessions, since these works are very much conceived for the specific kind of organ in whose tradition the composer stood. Whatever one may think of that tradition, these two books deserve to be recognized as highlights in the early-19th-century art of the organ.