Impromptu organ performance in St. Mary's Cathedral, Erfurt, Germany

Over the past week, I have had the pleasure of accompanying my parents on a Pipedreams Organ tour of southeast Germany. We saw and heard many famous organs during this week.

In this video, this is the resident organist of St. Mary's Cathedral in Erfurt playing. I'd love to share the name of this piece with you, but there isn't one: The organist said he'd introduce the capabilities of the organ by "improvising a little." I never would have anticipated 12 minutes of this... (Apologies for the less than optimal audio: This is me just recording on my Samsung phone, which picks up my own breathing and the noise of people going in and out of the church better than the organ.)

A couple things don't come over well in the video: First, the sheer magnitude of the sound. Especially during the section around 2:20 (my favorite bit), the organ is filling the entire cathedral with chest-rattling bass notes.

And second, during the part where he "answers" each phrase with a second quieter repetition of the same phrase (around 3:00), he's using a second set of pipes on the opposite end of the cathedral which are apparently controllable through a single console. The music truly enveloped us. This entire performance was an Awesome experience in the original sense of the word. If this had been the only piece we heard performed all through the trip, it still would have been worth flying half way around the world to hear. (And there were several truly stupefying performances like this, though this was probably my favorite.)