Luca Scandali - Tartini: Concerto Transcriptions for Organ (2025) Hi-Res

While the life of Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) is well documented, the same cannot be said for Leonhard Frischmuth (c.1725–1764), a name unknown to many. Frischmuth is today best known for having created and published keyboard transcriptions of six of Tartini’s violin concertos. Frischmuth hailed from the Thuringian village of Gräfenroda, near Gotha, where he studied organ under Johann Christoph Keller, himself a student at Leipzig’s Tomasschule during the tenure of J.S. Bach. Frischmuth travelled to Amsterdam probably around 1750, where he became a pupil of Conrad Friedrich Hurlebusch, organist of the Oude Kerk. On 26 July 1763, Frischmuth was appointed organist of the Nieuwezijdskapel, the only position he is known to have held, and he died having served in the role for just 15 months.

His Tartini transcriptions were published as his Opus 4 by the Dutch printer Arnoldus Olofsen in a collection of concertos ‘accommodati per il cembalo’ (adapted to the harpsichord) and, as was the custom, playable on other keyboard instruments such as the organ. Holland in the early 18th century was ‘ground zero’ for burgeoning interest in organ transcriptions of Italian instrumental concertos, beginning with the blind organist Jan Jacob de Graaf (1672–1738), who performed his own transcriptions of concertos by various composers at concerts he gave on the organ of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam.

The decision to record these concertos on a historic Italian instrument, built around 1745–50 by the Dalmatian-born organ builder Pietro Nachini (1694–1769), whom Tartini probably knew personally, can only enhance these pieces, as its sonic characteristics would undoubtedly have been familiar to Tartini: at the Basilica del Santo in Padua, Tartini had four organs at his disposal, some of them reconstructed by Nachini in the period 1743–49.