Four organ showpieces performed of the Great organ of Milan Cathedral.

Franz Liszt was a master at taking well-known tunes from popular operas and turning them into highly effective concert paraphrases for piano and orchestra. He had already produced 3 based on Meyerbeer’s 1849 hit opera Le Prophet. The fourth work was to be a vast Fantasie and Fugue for organ taking the tune sung in Act I by the three Anabaptists urging people to see the error of their ways.

Max Reger’s Fantasies for organ are, like Liszt’s works, virtually symphonic poems for solo organ. The Op.40/2 work is divided into 6 movements, and each mirrors the text of the Protestant chorale on which the work is based – anger, sin and love all are depicted here.

Cesar Franck’s Piece Heroique is the last of his Three Pieces for organ composed in 1878 for the inaugural concerts of the new Cavaille-Coll organ in the Salle des Fetes in the Palais du Trocadero. The Franco-Prussian war had just ended, and the French had been defeated. The troops marched through Paris in 1871. It must have been a sombre procession. Franck’s work is rather more funereal than jingoistic – its emotions are ambivalent.

Just as Liszt was a piano virtuoso, Edwin Lemare was the foremost organ virtuoso of his time. Taking a work by another piano virtuoso, Camille Saint-Saens’ orchestral symphonic poem Danse Macabre (already Liszt had transcribed the original for piano) and transcribing it for organ, Lemare created one of the most famous of organ showpieces.