The organ music of Joan (or Juan) Cabanilles (1644–1712) is virtuosic and colourfully Baroque, and touched with a distinctively Spanish intensity. Cabanilles is claimed as the most prolific of all composers for the organ, and publication of his works, begun in 1927, has not caught up with his output. The surviving manuscripts can be seriously corrupt, requiring extensive editing and sometimes even detailed recomposition. This recording therefore uses a number of new editions to present the music as never heard before, as close as possible to what the composer might have intended.

Timothy Roberts studied with Christopher Kite and Jill Severs, also receiving master-class tuition from Kenneth Gilbert and Gustav Leonhardt. He worked for about thirty years as a busy touring keyboard player, twenty of them as principal keyboard of the Gabrieli Consort and Players; he also became director of His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts. In recent years he has also gained experience as a recording engineer and sound editor, composer and music-typesetter. This is his third recording for Toccata Classics; the first, of the complete organ music of John Worgan (TOCC0332) earned the following encomium in Fanfare: ‘The recording is made with ideal clarity; Roberts’s booklet notes are highly informative […]. If you are a fan of 18th-century organ literature, do not hesitate to snap up this disc without delay; warmly recommended.’

‘I simply had to drop everything to recommend this Toccata Classics recording in the strongest possible terms to all lovers of renaissance and baroque music and of organ music in general’ – MusicWeb International on Vol.1

‘this recording may be the closest thing we’ll ever get to hearing Cabanilles’s music as he might have played it. I look forward to the next volume of the collection’ – Fanfare

Performed on:
- organ of the Church of Sant Jaume, Vila-real, Valencia
- organ in seventeenth-century style by Gerhard Grenzing for the Church of San Jose, Navalcarnero, Madrid
- harpsichord in seventeenth-century Flemish style by Michael Johnson