John Gardner: Complete Organ Music, Volume One

The music of the English composer John Gardner (1917–2011) – basically tonal and always impeccably crafted – is characterised by rhythmic vivacity and harmonic immediacy. His musical fingerprints come from his love of jazz, Renaissance and Baroque procedures and his mastery of imitative counterpoint; his use of established musical forms invests them with a quirky and distinctive harmonic idiom. This first album of two, collecting his entire output of organ music, presents not only his sly humour but also the staggering contrapuntal craftsmanship of his fugue on a theme by Anton Bruckner – one of the monuments of recent British writing for the organ.