FRANK MORANA
AmerOrganist 37/9

ERICH URBANNER, Phantasiestück für Orgel (1995), Doblinger 18556. €14.50. This work presents a succession of compositional ideas integrated within a style and structure that is all-too- well-organized. The first three sections remind one that the term “fantasy” does not always refer to the number of themes explored; these can be many or few, and the “theme” in this instance is nothing more than the interval of the minor third, which is reiterated and expanded in various ways. The first two sections bear a kind of question-and-answer relation to one another, and the next builds to a climax on a set of repeated chords, but the pointillistic gestures at the outset soon give way to an ongoing, academically-oriented serial treatment that was more prevalent in the 1970s than in the 1990s. The fourth section, “quasi recit,” is a predictable set of eight short phrases interspersed with pedal solos. The fifth section features an a due part in the left hand (in the manner of, say, two bassoons) with five-note chords in the right hand; a series of short tremolandi and repeated triplet chords; and a kind of foreground melody in the pedal, with a due parts in each of the hands. The sixth section is an eleven-measure bridge to the seventh section––a melody-and-accompaniment affair in which the roles of “melody” and “accompaniment” become progressively obscured as each traverses a wider and wider ground. The seventh and eighth sections, like the fourth, consist of short phrases interspersed,––in the seventh section, with pedal solos (six phrases), and in the eighth section, with silences (ten phrases). The coda features a kind of passaggio in the manual, and two in the pedals. There is little here that is idiomatic to the organ, but the scheme is such that the listener might almost agree that any such “human” elements as wit, warmth, or emotion would be wholly undesirable and out-of-place.