František Brixi: Organ Concerto in F Major | Nicole Keller, Organ, Balint Karosi, Conductor Clarinet

About the Organ: Support Balint : 0:00 Introduction 0:25 I. Allegro 6:56 II. Andante (Version for clarinet by Balint K.) 12:37 III. Allegro Tonight’s final concert opens with a splendid example of eighteenth-century Classical organ composition, giving us an opportunity to hear how the newly reborn Klais/Fisk instrument handles this fascinating area of the repertoire. František Xaver Brixi’s Concerto # 5 in F major for organ and orchestra was composed within two decades of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig, just 160 or so miles northwest of Prague, Brixi’s home base, but the distance between the Thomaskantor’s output and that of his younger contemporary is far vaster than either that geography or age difference might suggest. We are in what the experts call the “pre-Classical” world here, one which, not many years down the pike, will produce the mature Mozart—whose music was as beloved in Prague as was that of tonight’s composer. Brixi was born in Prague in 1732. Like Bach, he came from a long line of musicians: his father, Simon, was a prominent composer, teacher, and church organist in Prague, and relatives in the countryside of Bohemia personified the following description: “In Bohemia itself, there were…so many skilled and outstanding musicians of all kinds, that it [was] possible, even in the countryside and often in the most insignificant towns, to gather together a considerable orchestra…” In the Brixi clan’s case this countryside was centered some 35 or so miles northeast of Prague, where Simon was born in 1683 (two years before Bach and Handel). When he died in Prague in 1735, his widow, also a product of that area, returned to her hometown and subsequently remarried; but the musical gene was already implanted in the three-year-old František, and at the age of 12 he was sent off to a monastery in the nearby (14 miles away) town of Kosmonosy, where the Piarist monastery had a well-developed musical tradition. Seven year later, in 1749, the young man was ready for the big time (he’d been described in school records as “felicissimus ingenii”—“the most fortunate talent”), and off he went to Prague.