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The theme of light in an organ album may at first seem trivial, but here it is anything but—especially since we are dealing with a very particular kind of light: a backlit perspective, something that poses considerable challenges even for visual artists. Angela Metzger’s Choral Visions of Light and Darkness neither relies on the device of chiaroscuro (a term borrowed from painting), nor does it follow the well-trodden path of “per aspera ad astra” or “ex tenebris in lucem.”

Metzger quite literally places Herbert Howells’ Psalm Prelude No. 3, “Though I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death” (Set 1, Op. 32), at the center of the album, arranging the remaining six works symmetrically around it: Max Reger (opening and closing), Philipp Maintz (b. 1977, whose two compositions appear in positions two and six), and Louis Vierne (tracks three and five).

All of these works approach the theme of light in a subtle manner. Neither Maintz’s chorale prelude XIX, “Wie schön leuchtet uns der Morgenstern”, nor Reger’s Fantasy Op. 40 No. 1 on the same chorale dazzles with virtuosity. The same holds true for Reger’s Dankpsalm Op. 145 No. 2 and Maintz’s chorale prelude III, “Die Nacht ist vorgedrungen.” The only work on the disc that radiates with full brightness is Vierne’s Hymne au soleil Op. 53 No. 3; his Feux follets Op. 53 No. 4 flits far more elusively across manuals and pedals than the hymn.

The sequence and dramaturgy of the program are intelligently conceived and entirely coherent, lending particular weight to Howells’ psalm. Metzger shapes this work, as she does all the others, with calm assurance, richly varied registration, and precisely judged tempi. Particularly striking is the way she harnesses the acoustics and long reverberation of the vast Konstantin Basilica to her advantage.

She allows all the pieces—even Vierne’s toccata-like hymn, but above all Reger’s dense textures—to unfold organically and breathe like living organisms. Nothing feels rushed, driven, or careless. Metzger is a true architect of sound, and she has already demonstrated her technical mastery on her previous album of organ works by Betsy Jolas (NEOS, reviewed in organ 4/2025).

Further welcome discoveries are the two chorale preludes by the Aachen-born Philipp Maintz, presented here in their world premiere recordings. The booklet notes that since 2017 Maintz has been working—modelled on Bach’s Orgelbüchlein—on a cycle of chorale preludes, initially for liturgical use and later also for the concert hall. These are meditative, highly restrained yet finely coloured preludes in which the chorale melodies, though often fragmented, always remain perceptible, and which would deserve a place of honour in The Orgelbüchlein Project (www.orgelbuechlein.co.uk).
In “collaboration” with the symphonically conceived Eule organ of the Trier Konstantin Basilica (87 stops) and the immense acoustics of the original Roman palace hall, Angela Metzger has produced an album that is entirely convincing, both interpretively and conceptually.

Burkhard Schäfer

organ – Journal für die Orgel 1/2026 © Schott Music, Mainz 2026

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Artistic impression: 10/10
Sound quality: 10/10
Overall: 10/10

Darkness and light are inseparably intertwined. “Where there is much light, there is also deep shadow,” Goethe has his Götz von Berlichingen declare – though the author is more often quoted for a far less philosophical line. Goethe, who also devised a theory of color that makes little sense without light, was undoubtedly right. Yet this quotation does not truly apply to Angela Metzger’s recording. Aptly titled Counterlight, the album shines above all through one thing: light. Shadows are virtually absent here. At most, one might count the extremely generous acoustics of Trier’s Constantine Basilica – where the CD was recorded – as a kind of shadow, since the space presents a genuine challenge for any recording. The sheer scale of the building and the resulting reverberation are immense. Still, this has been captured convincingly: the space and its acoustics are integral to any organ, after all. Some passages sound a little more indirect than one might be used to, but overall the balance between acoustics and instrument is well judged. And this is far from the album’s only strength.

Carefully Crafted Program Architecture

Angela Metzger has assembled a program that is both coherent and compelling, organized with strict symmetry. Framed by Max Reger’s Dankpsalm and his chorale fantasia Wie schön leucht’ uns der Morgenstern, the program includes chorale preludes by Philipp Maintz and two movements from Louis Vierne’s Pièces de Fantaisie (Hymne au soleil and Feux follets), with Herbert Howells’s centrally placed Psalm Prelude on Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Program dramaturgy – often neglected in both recordings and concerts – is crystal clear here, and Metzger’s brilliant interpretations elevate it even further. The Munich-based organist, who teaches organ at the University of Church Music in Bayreuth, has in recent years built a reputation as an interpreter particularly devoted to contemporary music and to thoughtfully constructed programs. That reputation precedes her – and with this recording, she confirms it in full.

Subtle and Meticulously Devised

Metzger employs the resources of the large Eule organ in the Constantine Basilica with remarkable foresight. In Reger, for example, she exploits its dynamic range to the fullest extremes. The way the profound, grounding 32’ stop gently yet powerfully underpins the triple forte at the end of the Dankpsalm is nothing short of magnificent. The organ’s three lowest registers are truly a delight for 32’ aficionados, offering everything from the most delicate pianissimo to an overwhelming tutti for every conceivable organist’s state of mind. Philipp Maintz’s chorale preludes captivate with their refined sonorities, which Metzger renders with equal subtlety and care. These are precisely the pieces one wants to hear more than once.

For French and English Romantic repertoire in the vein of Vierne and Howells, this organ provides an almost inexhaustible palette of colors, which the organist commands with complete assurance. Moreover, her interpretations radiate a deep inner calm: tempi are spot on, timing is impeccable, and everything is attuned to the synthesis of space, instrument, and work. This is a musician who does not put virtuosity on display for its own sake, but places it entirely at the service of the music. The result convinces from the very first bar to the last.

Guido Krawinkel

Klassik Heute, January 24, 2026

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Far from the clichés usually attached to the instrument, the organ music of Betsy Jolas resounds with the same inventive richness that characterizes all her work, exploring the instrument’s full potential — whether as a solo voice (Angela Metzger) or in dialogue with a chamber orchestra (the SWR Cologne).

Betsy Jolas has a deep affection for the organ, an instrument she studied during her years at Princeton. This recording — almost a complete collection, missing only Musique d’autres jours for cello and organ (2020) — gathers four works whose very titles reflect a musical thought nourished by the composer’s experience of everyday life.

Leçons du Petit Jour (2007) is an homage to her teacher Messiaen, with stylized birdsong and natural sounds, free figures set against a quiet sonic canvas that fade as quickly as they appear. Jolas invites us to listen to the act of emergence itself, carefully choosing her colors and occasionally playing with the mechanical noises of the instrument: sonic discoveries and feline arabesques evoke fleeting sound phenomena inspired by that privileged moment of the day.

Musique de jour opens on a G — a note of special significance in her life, she confides — one that initiates many of her keyboard works. It serves as a grounding tone, like Varèse’s “ison,” around which a polyphonic space unfolds, culminating midway through the piece in a refined four-voice fugato.

In Musique d’Hiver (1971), for organ and chamber orchestra — the most striking work on the recording — the organ of Cologne’s Klaus von Bismarck Saal becomes a generator of sound, and the score, written without barlines or metric indications, a vessel for all possibilities. The role of percussion, the spatial dispersion, and the sudden emergence of chordal blocks again recall Varèse. There are no violins, but ten violas and six double basses, joined by piano and harp. The organ adds its colors to a virtuosic, constellatory writing that shifts between transparency (through timbral relay) and density, nourished by the organ’s full stops and the percussion’s exuberant outbursts. With evident joy — and a touch of humor (including a jazzy double-bass solo) — Jolas expresses her ideal of a living, liberated music, brilliantly realized here by Angela Metzger and Titus Engel with the SWR Cologne.
The Trois Études Campanaires, originally conceived for the carillon of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, are performed here on the church organ of St. Antonius in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel, whose percussive registers (celesta, marimba, and carillon) prove highly effective: free polyrhythms overlay celesta, marimba, and carillon in the first and last studies, while the second is graced by the wandering line of the celesta alone. The music is minimalist, written purely for the beauty of sound — reaffirming the composer’s fascination with rare timbres and unexpected combinations.

Michèle Tosi

ResMusica, November 2, 2025

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Shortly before her hundredth birthday, Betsy Jolas continues to glow through a distinctive body of work. The German organist Angela Metzger now dedicates an entire album to her, Works for Organ and Orchestra, on which the organ does not appear as a grandiose instrument but as an intimate lantern that reveals an elusive, subtle musical language.

Trained at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München with Edgar Krapp and Bernhard Haas, Angela Metzger completed her studies with distinction before broadening her musical profile by taking up the oboe at the Landeskonservatorium Innsbruck with Konrad Zeller. A prizewinner at renowned international competitions — from Bad Homburg to Tokyo, via Wiesbaden, Wuppertal and the ARD Competition in Munich — she has been honored with awards such as the Bayernwerk Culture Prize and the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize.

Her career today brings her to major international stages, both in the concert repertoire as a soloist and alongside orchestras like the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, the Helsinki Philharmonic and the Augsburg Philharmonic, and she performs on instruments ranging from historic organs to contemporary new builds.

Angela Metzger has risen to the top of the international organ world — thanks to astonishing technique, modern approaches to presentation and performance, and an insatiable curiosity for repertoire, particularly contemporary music. Her disarming musicality and rhythmic precision were recently praised at Milano Musica 2025; critics described her as “extraordinary: breathtaking in clarity as in articulation, admirably relaxed and with impressive purity of tone.”

In that spirit of discovery she now devotes a whole album to Betsy Jolas’s organ-and-orchestra works. The new release is timely for the composer’s 99th birthday (5 August 2025) — the “doyenne of Franco-American refinement” — whose singular language answers to no school or stylistic label.

Jolas’s music often resists immediate grasp, as Angela Metzger’s recording shows. Her organ scores open up a landscape where time does not march but drifts — like fog spreading over winter fields and drawing together again: Musique d’Hiver, Musique de Jour, Leçons du Petit Jour and the Trois Études Campanaires. Together they make less of a monument than a fleeting apparition, a suspended moment rather than a loud proclamation.

The reward of listening to this album is not catharsis but attention itself. If Feldman is the Rothko of sound, Jolas might be the Bonnard: intimate, elliptical, softly luminous. Rather than seeking dramatic peaks, one is invited to watch the discreet play of light on water. Instead of demanding intensity, one receives subtlety: how a single note bears the weight of the silence around it, or how a fragile line becomes a shared utopia between organ and orchestra.
The music on this recording reveals Jolas’s organ writing in its restraint and refinement. Organist Angela Metzger and the WDR Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Titus Engel are its impeccable advocates.

Wouter de Moor

classicagenda.fr, September 24, 2025

This album features four organ works by French-American composer Betsy Jolas (born 1926), a student of Olivier Messiaen. The first piece is the organ concerto Musique d’Hiver, a work for organ and chamber orchestra premiered in 1971. Often referred to as a « reference work for experimental musical thinking, » this piece features percussion as a prominent sound source alongside the organ. Also performed are the solo works Musique de Jour and Leçons du Petit Jour, organ meditations on the beginning of the day, birdsong, and the slow awakening of the world. The last piece, Trois Études Campanaires, is a set of three organ studies. They are described as « sounding bell studies » that « take on a new dimension on the organ of St. Antonius Düsseldorf-Oberkassel with its extraordinary percussion registers. » These pieces represent Jolas’s music, which is characterized by great grace and imagination. In them, Jolas uses extended instrumental techniques with great sensitivity, a hallmark of her work.

Organist Angela Metzger is an excellent interpreter throughout this program, having assimilated Jolas’s sound world and bringing it closer to listeners with her highly rhetorical playing.

Norbert Tischer

Pizzicato, 31.07.2025

This CD brings seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertoire into dialogue with contemporary works in a stimulating programme. The instrument is a 41-rank organ built by the Dutch firm Reil in 2009 according to North German Baroque models. It is well suited to the pieces by Buxtehude, Bach, and Scheidt, which are all engagingly performed. Registrations are always clear; the pleno is exciting but never overbearing. Metzger’s articulation is very crisp, especially in the Buxtehude and BWV 564, affording section of the pieces a dance-like quality.

The three contemporary works are all connected in some way to the traditions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century organ music. The title track by Danksagmüller (b. 1969) plays with the creative possibilities of the tracker action to create a soundworld that is variously mystical and industrial. Stops are drawn only partially and to different degrees throughout the piece, creating unexpected resonances and playing with expectations of timbre. Inspired by Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, the piece has fairly minimal melodic material which combines well with the unexpected timbres to create a whimsical and intriguing composition. Foccroulle’s Toccata draws on both the free-style and chorale-based compositional practices of the Baroque era. Glaus’ versets are a highly effective response to the Scheidt, full of fragmentary explorations of colour, texture, sound, and silence. Angela Metzger communicates these highly contrasting pieces with verve; her rhythmic precision and finely controlled articulation give the pieces a real sense of immediacy and vitality.

Martin Clarke

Organists’ Review, 12/2022, p.71

To get straight to the point: This CD by the German organist Angela Metzger is a hit in every respect. A sophisticated programme in which old and new music touch each other in all kinds of ways, sublimely performed on a fine organ in a good-sounding room.
Besides a number of ‘classics’ from early music, Angela Metzger has chosen three contemporary compositions that each in their own way hark back to examples from the past, and which are eminently suitable for old or new organs built according to historical models.

Franz Danksagmüller (*1969) – who, like Buxtehude, works in Lübeck – was inspired for the title piece Circuli by the triptych The Garden of Delights by ‘our’ Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516). On the right panel, Bosch depicted the so-called ‘musicians’ hell’, a place where broken or distorted musical instruments serve merely to torture the ears. Danksagmüller gives that surreal image sound technical form by not allowing any stop to be pulled out completely. Because the organist has a certain freedom in this, he or she becomes a kind of sound designer.
The title Circuli refers to Bosch’s belief in cyclical rebirth: a soul trapped in earthly life is reborn just as many times until it is fully liberated spiritually.
Metzger’s choice to programme Bach’s magisterial Vater unser after this is a golden touch – it takes us from hell to heaven.

Bernard Foccroulle (*1953) wrote his colourful Toccata in 2001 for the inauguration of the Freytag/Tricoteaux organ in Béthune, France, an instrument based on the North German Baroque style. The work variously refers to Buxtehude and his ‘stylus phantasticus’, but is written in a contemporary tonal language. The third contemporary piece is by Daniel Glaus (*1957). The Swiss organist-composer himself translates the title Toccatacet as “touching in silence” or “touched by silence”. The seven short versets, dating from 1986, therefore consist largely of moments of silence. The player is free to choose his or her own tempo, depending on the performance space. Captivating music!

Angela Metzger feels audibly at home in this contemporary repertoire, but she also plays works by Buxtehude, Bach and Scheidt very convincingly. The new organ, based on historical principles, built by Orgelmakerij Reil in 2009 for the Stadtpfarrkirche St. Nikolaus in Rosenheim (Bavaria), which is splendid in all its austerity, has everything for the music sounding on this CD.

The readable booklet is illuminated with creations by German artist Susanne Immer, including an explanation of the relationship between these artworks and the musical programme.
A trailer can be found on Angela Metzger’s YouTube channel, plus a video in which the organist explains this commendable release.

Joost van Beek

„De Orgelvriend“ (NL), 1/2023