REVIEW

Amelie Held - Debut

Live Recording from the Himmerod Abbey Summer Recital Series 2019

Music by J. S. Bach, W. A. Mozart, S. Karg-Elert, F. Liszt, L. Vierne, F. Chopin and G. Bizet

Additional Material: Video Recording on DVD

Label: Edition HERA, HERA02128 (2019)

To mark the 25th anniversary of the Edition Hera label, 23-year-old organist Amelie Held has recorded her debut album live. The recording was made at a concert in June 2019 on the Klais organ in the abbey church in Himmerod, Germany. Amelie Held began her training at the Regensburg Academy of Music, then went on to study musicology at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, before studying violin and organ in Detmold and at the Paris Conservatory with Michel Bouvard and Olivier Latry, among others. Since 2018, she has been enrolled for a master’s degree in organ with Ludger Lohmann in Stuttgart and has attended numerous international masterclasses. The same year she was also the youngest finalist of the prestigious international organ competition in Chartres, France  - a phenomenal career that sets high expectations for this CD, which, it should be noted in advance, are in no way disappointed. As this was a public organ concert being recorded, the organiser expected a program that was not too academic and which the performer achieved with a good blend of pieces. She begins in classical plenum sounds with Bach's Passacaglia in C minor and juxtaposes the piece with Mozart's baroque-inspired Overture in C major K. 399, an original piano work, by also allowing the reed plenums to call the tune. Sigfrid Karg-Elert's "Clair de lune" from the Francophile-Impressionistic set "Trois Impressions" op. 72 forms a first point of calm, which cleverly leads to Franz Liszt's "Saint Francis of Paola walking on the waves” in the arrangement by Max Reger. With "Etoile du soir" by Louis Vierne, the basic voices of this inherently neo-baroque organ are cleverly presented to advantage, before the colours of the French symphonic cathedral sound are cast into the space of the baroque abbey church at Himmerod with "Carillon de Westminster“. Another short intermezzo, Frédéric Chopin's Nocturne op. 9, No. 2 in Edwin Lemare's arrangement, leads to the popular finale, a Lemare fantasia on themes from Georges Bizet's opera "Carmen", in which Amelie Held ignites a veritable firework display of her registration skills.

Conclusion: The debut of a great, convincing artist, who is always thoughtful and virtuosic, who presents herself in a sensitively conceived program, is excellently realised by a recording that is clear and at the same time captures the spatial sound. The audio CD is accompanied by a video recording; the excellent booklet texts by Wolfgang Valerius (d/e/f) and the appealing pictures complete this production.

5/5

— Stefan Kagl, organ. Journal für die Orgel, 2020/02