Toccata and Fugue in D minor
An ethereal piece of music, executed flawlessly, in an amazing venue. What's not to love?
My first exposure to Toccata and Fugue was in the mid 1970’s, when I saw Rollerball. The music was entrancing, and I remember watching the rolling credits with intensity to figure out just what the hell it was.
And I learnt that it was a Johann Sebastian Bach composition for organ titled Toccata and Fugue in D minor.
Years later I bought a CD titled The Digital Fox, a collection of many of the recordings of an epic organist, Virgil Fox, largely because it had a copy of T&F.
I was not disappointed1.
Anyhow, I was doing my usual paging through YouTube, and found this absolute masterpiece. Liene Andreta Kalnciema at the Riga Cathedral in Latvia.
It is captivating, and totally worth the 9:16 you will spend watching it.
Unlike the disappointment of many of that era’s “Album Oriented Rock” recordings where one song was good, and the rest of the album was filler crap. If you got two catchy tunes on an album, you could call it a lucky day!
Geoff, this evening I sit here on my Medium and think, how blessed I am that I actually understood the title of your piece and that I can even hum the tune at will. I have always loved it, from the first hearing, can't remember when, but I was maybe a toddler. Another interesting rendition can be heard every day here: https://www.youtube.com/@CountdownWithKO on that Podcast. I think Keith stole the organist from the NY Yankees :)