Recorded on 21th May 2010 on the late renaissance organ (organ builder anonym ca. 1600) in the late gothic church Saint-Jacques in Liège, Belgium. This instrument, restaured in 1998 by the organ builder Schumacher (Baelen). The unmodified quarter-comma meantone temperament of the organ allows to play the Passacaglia as it is tonally restricted, whereas a lot of the later works use the fifths of flat major and f sharp, showing that Buxtehude had his organ tuned in an more equational like the Werckmeister temperament avoiding the „barbaric (Bachs expression) wrong fifth g sharp/e flat.
Mostly this piece is played with soft stops with a progressive addition of stops.
But in the baroque music books the Passacaglia is described as a festive musical form, which was played forte, on the organ thus more or less organo pleno. Even Mendelssohn seems to still have known this tradition, because for his early „Ostinato (1823) he indicated „Volles Werk (Full organ). The listeners of that time enjoyed the brilliant sound of the pleno, even if it was played for minutes because their ears where not yet overloaded with sound like the modern ones...
Special thanks to the organist of Saint-Jacques, the organ virtuoso Pierre Thimus.

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