Widor Early Symphonies

Charles-Marie Widor, Symphonies No. 3 and 4
Charles Krigbaum at the Newberry Memorial Organ, Woolsey Hall, Yale University
AKFA Records, SK-522, 1992

This is another issue in this series. I've little to add to my observations about the previous releases here except to confirm my previous impressions. This organ makes such convincing sounds that whatever it lacks in authenticity for this music it more than makes up for with its own very compelling voice. Overall, this instrument is much less reedy than the big Cavaillé-Colls--Aeolian Skinners in general, I think--though not less powerful. Rather, the power is made a different way, seemingly from just moving a whole lot of air through very large scale fluework rather than from a resort to brash reeds. That makes for a different effect, though I dare say it's no less effective.

This is always my impression of the more successful Skinners, that they exhibit a power and intensity all their own, some X-factor which newer "American Classic"-style concert organs (like the Dobson in Kimmel Center or the Meyerson Fisk) don't quite capture. I wonder what the comparative sound pressure levels between the instruments would be. It could be that I've got my teeth into a little subtlety that doesn't quite hold up to thorough rinsing, but every time I listen to this Woolsey Skinner I think "My god what a huge, huge sound."

The playing is excellent, as is the recording.

200 Years' Worth

Preludes, Fugues and Variations
Music of Bach, Beethoven, Franck and Rachmaninov
Frederick Moyer, Piano
JRI Records, J101

• Bach/David Moyer: "Herr Christ, der ein'ge Gottes-Sohn"
• Beethoven: Twelve Variations on a Russian Dance
• Franck/Bauer: Prelude, Fugue et Variation in b minor
• Rachmaninoff: Three Preludes from Op. 23: No. 2 in B-flat Major, No. 4 in D Major, No. 5 in g minor
• Bach/Busoni: Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532

***

Here's a fun recording from concert pianist Frederick Moyer. He has collected a recital of various pieces which conform to the basic forms of Franck's triptych: preludes, fugues or variations. For the preludes, we get three piano preludes from Rachmaninov's Opus 23 set, a transcription of Bach's organ chorale prelude Herr Christ, der ein'ge Gottes-Sohn, BWV 601, and Busoni's transcription of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532; that piece gives us our fugue, along with Franck's Prelude, fugue et variation in b minor, which latter piece gives us a variation planform; this is followed by Beethoven's substantial Twelve Variations On a Russian Dance, WoO 71.

I confess I have too many recordings of both Ferrucio Busoni's transcriptions of Bach's organ works and of Rachmaninov's preludes as well. But there are relatively few transcriptions of Cesar Franck's organ works for piano, and this is the first I'm aware of that transcribes this particular piece. In any case this collection of pieces in a single recital makes an intriguing grouping, and a welcome addition to my collection.

The CD issues from the small, new-to-me label JRI Recordings, whose catalog exists almost entirely of recordings by this pianist. Regardless, the recording is excellent, quiet and fairly closely-miked. Mr. Moyer plays with a deft touch and a very deliberate manner. I did find a few of his phrasings a bit distracting, especially when the organ transcriptions essentially gave him more notes to play than he had fingers; his idiomatic interruption of melodic line to surmount these difficulties is expertly handled (that is, with the same confident deliberateness of the rest of the performances), but nonetheless seems always to catch me a bit off-guard.

Small potatoes. It's a fine performance of an interesting collection of pieces, well-recorded and played.

Two More in a Series

Sylvius Leopold Weiss: Complete Lute Works, Volumes 2 and 3
Robert Barto, Lute
Naxos Records, 8.553988, 8.554350

***

Another couple volumes of this great Naxos series of the complete works of Sylvius Weiss, a composer introduced to me on this site by my friend Shrimplate.

I couldn't pretend this review to be of much value to established fans of lute and guitar music, as I have comparatively little such music in my collection. So my impressions are at least as much--no, mostly--to do with my budding awareness of the lute as an instrument as they are about the compositions. It's relatively new territory for me, but a good fit with my preferences. As an instrument which requires its player to think in harmonic as well as melodic terms--like the piano and the organ--the lute interests me as requiring a more complete musical immersion than, say, a flute.

These releases lead me to think about the lute versus the guitar. If one goes back far enough, the two instruments seem to have diverged from a common ancestor, but the guitar has gone on to a modern ubiquity while the lute seems now much more attached to antiquity. That seems a loss to me, since with its greater number of courses (often doubled) and greater pitch range the lute seems a more ambitious instrument than the guitar.

(It bears saying that the guitar seems to have a more flexible phenotype than many other instruments; seven- and eight- and ten- and of course 12-string guitars are not uncommon. I'm reminded of the great series of Delos recordings of Paul Galbraith playing a custom-made 8-string guitar of his own specification--the "Brahms guitar"--which he holds and plays like a cello, even having a post out the bottom which rests on a resonance box.)

The guitar's ongoing prominence in classical and popular music results in it being played in a much wider variety of manners and musical styles than the lute. This longevity has resulted in traditions and vital schools of musical thought surrounding the guitar in far-flung places stretching from the present day back several centuries. The lute by contrast seems to be reliving a couple hundred years of glory from ages now long past. But I personally find the sound of the lute more pleasing to the ear, lighter and richer.

Certainly the lute shares some of the guitar's virtues: it's a salon instrument, intended to impact a small group of people in close proximity; it works well accompanying the human voice or in combination with other instruments; and the artist has a deeply intimate interface with the instrument, controlling much of its tone production in addition to voicing and phrasing. So the sounds produced are much more individual than, say, several people recording Bach on various Steinway Ds--and this is without addressing the variety of the instruments themselves, which I imagine are highly variable.

So much for my philosophical wanderings. Without knowing more about any of this than I do, it seems immediately apparent that Robert Barto is a virtuoso of the first order. There is a strong sense of musical statement, of a coherent musical mind projecting these works for us. Weiss's compositions, as I mentioned in a previous review, have the modern harmonic sensibility of Bach and Scarlatti and Handel, but they are less contrapuntally rigorous than Bach or imitative than Scarlatti, and these compositions at least sound very idiomatic to the lute. Bach's lute music is frequently heard on guitar, and so much of Bach has been transcribed for other instruments (or other genres altogether); I can't help wondering how some of Weiss's pieces would come off on guitar or a keyboard instrument. As it is, some of the movements seem technically very challenging for the lutenist.

Pleasant and impressive as these recordings are, what I have not gleaned at this stage is whether these compositions will come to have stronger individual identities than is presently the case, either the individual movements themselves or the suites. For all the variety in the lute's tonal capabilities, these pieces sound all of a certain stripe, much like Scarlatti's 550 harpsichord sonatas or Tournemire's L'orgue mystique. I suspect this is something that needs a bit of investment of time; I'm simply not familiar enough with any of it to have determined my favorites. But at this point I would have little hope of determining which movements went with which suite if my iTunes were to scramble the tracks. While that was true for me at one time with Bach's Brandenburgs as well, I wonder if I'll ever find myself passionately attached to these pieces rather than liking and admiring the sound generally.

Whatever the case, I am mesmerized by the sound--the courtly, intimate and very civilized sound.

Size Matters

This is a post from January of last year from my other blog. It seems it might have a more sensible existence over here.

***

I continue my little musical nostalgia tour from the last post. It's been a musical couple of weeks, which is much better than a couple weeks of politics.



Our hotel in PHL is a block from the old Wanamaker department store, now owned & operated by Macy's. This store contains, in what seems the ultimate non-sequitur, the largest operational pipe organ in the world.




As a devoted fan of the pipe organ, I've known of this instrument for many years. It's not really my kind of organ; this is an ultimate example of what we might call the symphonic organ, that is, the organ as a kind of one-man orchestra. This design philosophy, which really took off after Bach's death and found great flowering in the 19th and 20th Centuries at the hands of France's Aristide Cavaille-Coll and America's Ernest M. Skinner, among many others, stands in philosophical contrast to the organs that Bach knew. Bach's organ was a stand-alone instrument with its own repertoire and its own history having nothing to do with the orchestra or any other instruments. Starting in the late 1950s, by which time these symphonic organs were the established norm, there was a push in the organ world to return to the non-imitative roots of the baroque organ, creating a pretty deep rift--almost a civil war--between the neo-baroque and romantic / symphonic camps. To me this whole fight has been a vital and interesting one (in a sitting- on- the- sidelines- while- buttoned- down- Christians- throw- stones- at- each- other kinda way), one with a few dollops of intrigue thrown in; but that's kind of another post.



The organ at Wanamaker's has the additional distinction of being incongruently located in the eight-story central court of an operating retail department store. As if the pipe organ does not seem anachronistic enough on its own (something about which I'm feeling rather bruised and vulnerable lately), the idea of supporting such a beast with retail shoppers of socks and underwear is positively surreal. Proven so, actually, since nobody I saw shopping during the 45 minute concert paid the least attention to the music. But John Wanamaker had money and a love for the organ and a place to put one, and the rest is history.

Yesterday was the first time I ever heard the Wanamaker instrument. I've walked past the building a few times in the last five years, but the last couple times I've been here the store has been closed for its conversion from a Lord & Taylor to a Macy's. Yesterday everything was up and running as usual. There are regular noontime concerts played every day of the week, and there are afternoon concerts three days a week, plus weekend concerts and occasional special events (including after-hours things where they can let the beast out of its cage properly). So I timed my walk around the city to make the noon concert.

The organ speaks into the large, central shopping court from several levels, and the delivery-van-sized console is visible behind a railing on the third level. Walking around to the console, a flat screen monitor televises the organist at work. I can't entirely fault the shoppers for not paying more attention to the music, as there are no accommodations made for concertgoers--no seats and not many good places to stand and watch & listen--and the repertoire, while pleasant and demonstrative of the huge variety of the lower half of the instrument's dynamic range, was not thought-provoking. Which is as it should be; after all, it is a working retail establishment, and they can hardly do without their phones or normal business transactions for two 45-minute periods every day.



After the concert I talked to the organist and one of the two technical people who look after the instrument full-time, and I got a tour of the massive console. Much of the organ--including this awesome control console--was built by a shop on the 12th floor of the store (space now leased out to other tenants), with the pipes themselves coming from the Kimball Organ Company. The instrument was originally installed in the department store in 1911, at which time its 10,000 pipes (already several times the number found in most church organs today) were deemed "inadequate" for the space and enlargements were undertaken. By about 1930 the organ had tripled in size to its present 28,000 pipes. I talk of the organ exercising the quieter half of its dynamic range, but even then the power of the instrument rather takes one by surprise. Considering that, from where I listened to the concert from the third floor I could not have heard a normal cell phone ringer down on the main shopping floor below me, the fact that even a quiet solo stop is clearly audible throughout the eight-story courtyard gives one an idea of what kind of horsepower is behind it. And naturally, the organ has the resources to make conversation in the courtyard quite impossible. Those who have heard a good-quality pipe organ in their local church or auditorium know that organ bass is often felt as much as it is heard, the product of high energy, low frequency sound waves produced by the large pedal pipes. Well, one can imagine what kind of power is required to shake the air--and the occupants--of so large a space as this one.

It's amazing, really, that Macy's would agree to continue funding something which at this point can only be considered an historical and nostalgic oddity. Surely this instrument no longer generates any real revenue, and yet Macy's pay a staff organist and several assistants, as well as two full-time maintenance people. They also contract out some maintenance services when the jobs get too big for the in-house shop to handle. While there is a non-profit foundation called the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, and the organ has received several substantial endowments and private donations, it is still some burden on Macy's and one cannot help feeling grateful that they have embraced this quirk in the store's past.

It's a little off track, but even as long as I've been a student of this instrument and (some of) its repertoire--nearly 30 years now--I'm still not immune to its magic. I have made treks over the years to a number of individual pipe organs both here and in Europe, instruments which I've come through recordings to love; I've examined and played them in my unskilled way, and gotten a sense of their presence and of the rooms and acoustics where they live; and I've been witness to some awesome demonstrations by people who knew what they were doing at these instruments. And I'm always frankly amazed at the organist's skill.



Yesterday at Wanamaker's I watched the organist at the console during the concert via a little flat screen monitor outside the cordoned-off area where the console sits, and though he appeared to be a thousand years old he still achieved a near-magical feat that virtually none of us could do. The coordination required of an organist--just the aspect of playing coherent musical phrases with one's feet while the hands do their thing simultaneously on two separate keyboards--requires a physical command of one's body that borders on the impossible. (Look sometime at the notation for Bach's Trio Sonatas for organ and you'll have some idea of what this inter-limb / digit coordination entails.)

But there's more. Look at the photos of this console.





In addition to six separate keyboards (basically, one for each division of the organ, each of which will have a distinct function or sonic character) plus a full pedalboard, there is a tablet for activating each of several hundred individual timbres of the organ, controls for coupling divisions together (at various octave intervals), pedals and sliders for controlling the volume of sound allowed to escape from the chambers where the pipes are contained, and a baffling array of buttons and footswitches which can be programmed to singly make large-scale changes of the organ's settings. And a couple dozen other odds and ends to boot. Ignoring the business of simply playing a coherent musical thought in this setting (again, a not inconsiderable task by a long shot), just the management of all these other controls and resources at this console requires a physical dexterity and concentration that I would venture few of us ever have to muster in life. Put the two things together--playing music and managing the machinery--and we have arrived at outright sorcery. This has to rank among the most complicated tasks the human brain and body can tackle. I can think of no better way for a hunched-over old man to inarguably win the pissing contest of masculine achievement than to play something coherent on this instrument. Top THAT, football boy. That the purpose of all this training and skill is to fill an arena-sized room with a kind of bone-marrow-boiling sound makes it all the more interesting. Or, looked at from the opposite angle, that such stirring musical ideas come to fruition by way of such great demands placed on the artist makes the art remarkable.

That Gretchaninov Disc Wasn't a Fluke

Rheinberger: Sacred Choral Works
Kansas City Chorale / Phoenix Bach Choir; Charles Bruffy
Chandos Records, CHSA 5055
Four Motets Op. 133; Mass Op. 109; Three Sacred Songs Op. 69; Easter Hymn Op. 134

***

(I didn't really think it was, but here's the proof just the same.)

As a lover of organ music I'm a bit surprised that I've failed to latch onto the works of German (or Liechtensteinian) Josef Rheinberger (1839-1901). Falling between Felix Mendelssohn and Max Reger (he was a contemporary of Brahms)--all of whom I enjoy--one would think I'd eat up his output of some 20 Sonatas. But Rheinberger and me are apparently like Mozart and me: people far smarter and more informed than I have given their stamp of approval, but his music just begets no response whatsoever in me. In both these cases, I reserve the right for the long-planted seeds to suddenly bear fruit, but every time I check back there's just dirt (in the case of Mozart, the seeds have had 30 years to germinate and I'm pretty sure they're dead and they'll stay that way).

Well, that's organ music. But after my thrilling discovery of the Kansas City Chorale and Phoenix Bach Choir singing Gretchaninov, I was eager to give this group's next release a quick audition. And Rheinberger it is. Well--a big relief to his corpse, I'm sure--I like his choral music rather more than his organ music. Indeed, I would have pegged it as either Brahms or Mendelssohn if I hadn't read the label; it has Mendelssohn's lyricism. Gently contrapuntal and resolutely tonal and conservative as church music apparently should be, this is music that will surprise no one. But it's well-crafted and quietly engaging and makes for a disc I'm happy to add to my collection.

The ensemble and conductor Bruffy bring the same wondrous sensibilities and careful precision to this disc as to their previous. His tempi and phrasing and the balance of the ensemble are simply beyond reproach; inspired, even. I was tempted to conclude that Rheinberger's writing is not quite as engaging as Gretchaninov's to my ear, but it's growing on me after several hearings. Still, the Russian works seem more ambitious or momentous somehow -- transcendent, almost otherworldly, familiar yet different. Maybe it's just that Gretchaninov hails from a more isolated corner of human culture. There is something predictable about much of the Rheinberger (not to say mundane); it sounds a bit like a solidly competent composer using the standard tools available to him.

But for all that, this is still a virtuosic display of choral singing with moments of real depth and inspiration. Much of it is soaringly beautiful, and here's to hoping it continues to grow on me as it has. But for now it still gives me a warm glow of satisfaction rather than leaving my mouth open in astonishment. Call it fully five stars for execution and four for material. Well, that's still a pretty great accomplishment at that.

And who knows? Maybe this will be the eye-opener for Rheinberger's organ works for me.

One Good Turn Deserves Another

Widor: Organ Favorites
Robert Delcamp at the Martin Pasi organ of the St. Cecilia Cathedral, Omaha
Naxos Records, 8.570310
Excerpts from Symphonies 1-6 and 9, etc.

***

I've long wondered what role authenticity really plays in musical enjoyment. I found myself very early on drawn to the sound of period instruments in baroque music, but not, I think, because these sounds were supposed to be "correct." No, I just liked the fundamental sounds better; I liked the clarity and intonation and / or lack of affected vibrato in music of my favored period. Even more contrarily, I always wondered whether more contemporary music wouldn't sound better on these older sounds (we do the converse of this all the time, by playing antique music on modern orchestral instruments, harpsichord music on piano, Buxtehude and Pachelbel and Scheidemann on modern organs). I knew that the music of Cesar Franck, say, played on the Flentrop organ at Harvard University--an organ whose sound I so loved and which was so effective in Bach--would go against custom and even the composer's stated desires; and yet I still felt the music would come off really well in that setting. Different, sure; but moving and wonderful and maybe better in some ways--small and focused and intimate.

Well, I never did get to hear Franck on that particular Flentrop (though E. Power Biggs recorded Hindemith to very good effect on it), but I've heard quite a bit of his music on very different instruments than Franck had in mind; and as with Bach's music Franck has a near-universal appeal that transcends period specifics.

This present release is another opportunity to put some of these questions front and center. The instrument, the Op. 14 of 2003 from the shops of Martin Pasi and Associates, resides in the St. Cecilia Cathedral in Omaha, NE, and is familiar to us from two recently-reviewed discs of baroque music performed by George Ritchie and Julia Brown (another issue from which Buxtehude cycle I have since acquired, recorded on the same instrument). We may recall from those reviews that the organ is really two organs in one, sporting a dual temperament. The whole organ of 55 stops on three manuals and pedal is available in well-tempering, and a smaller portion--29 stops on two manuals and pedal--is available in quarter-comma meantone. This is a really valuable tool for exploring the music of Bach and earlier, as those temperaments were a fact of life before the 19th Century, and music sounds different when tempered.

(Drawknobs for well-tempered; sliding levers for meantone.)

But the organs which Cesar Franck played were not tempered, at least not anything like what Buxtehude knew. So the idea of a non-equally-tempered organ being used for more contemporary music--music made familiar to us via equal tempering--seemed to push my old-sounds-with-new-music idea out nearer the uncharted waters. Once again it's our friends at Naxos who deliver the goods for us. The prevalent well-tempering of the organ (all 55 of the organ's stops are available this way) is subtle enough that it might be mistaken for equal temperament if you weren't paying close attention. None of the keys is woefully off color, and the Widor Symphonies spend much of their time in familiar tonalities. But these pieces meander through a much wider range of tonalities than was common in the Baroque, resulting in an occasional piquancy from the tuning and a glow to some of the resolutions that you don't hear with equal tempering. It's a little unexpected, but just as delightful here as with music where it's more commonly found.

And quite apart from the tuning, this instrument is clearly not from Cavaillé-Coll's workshop. It's a nicely powerful instrument with a solid 32' underpinning in a really wonderful, reverberant space, but it doesn't have a characteristic French sound; the reeds especially lack that brassy snarl that so characterizes C-C's organs. Just the same, I think it sounds fantastic in this literature, even if it might have sounded a bit odd to Franck's ears.

More distracting than the temperament to me is the organ's fairly flexible wind, which makes itself known in some of the big, chordy sections of the Symphony Finales. It's not extreme, and I don't mean to protest (though in fact I do think of it as a defect of antiquity that someone resurrected centuries later in an attempt to be "fashionable" and others followed suit), but it's an affectation that one simply isn't used to hearing in instruments after the Baroque. And a couple times I wonder if I didn't hear the instrument struggling to provide enough wind to meet the organist's demands. (In a couple recordings of Biggs' Flentrop, one could hear some parts of the organ flat slightly at the big climaxes, something which organ builder Fritz Noack told me a couple years ago was due to inadequate winding of the instrument's rückpositiv division--which malady he was hired to remedy. Well, this Pasi organ's temperament might be playing a role here: were the meantone stops added to the mix for big climaxes, for example?) Maybe my ears were just playing tricks on me. The effect, if there was one, was very subtle and nothing to prevent a thorough enjoyment of the performances.

Organist Robert Delcamp hails from Sewanee, Tennessee, where he is Professor of Music, University Organist and Choirmaster, and Chair of the Music Department at The University of the South. He has made several recordings for Naxos, mostly involving the music of Marcel Dupré. This marks Dr. Delcamp as a specialist in French repertoire and makes him a natural for Widor's music (Dupré was Widor's assistant at St. Sulpice in Paris for many years before taking over the position when Widor retired), and his performances are really excellent. He takes his time to let the organ speak into the great space, and he lingers over Widor's writing like someone who is trying to tell a story. I've never heard these pieces better, and rarely as good.

The Glories of YouTube

For those not familiar with Bach's Trio Sonatas for organ, they represent yet another milestone of organ composition from the German master. There are six Sonatas in all, each in three movements, and they involve (as the name implies) three musical lines in each movement: one for each of the hands and one for the feet. Registration is generally static, and the whole show is in the mastery of the dense, highly imitative counterpoint.

The feet are especially tasked here. Bach placed greater demands on the organist's feet than any composer to that point, and nowhere so much as in these pieces. The coordination required to play them at all is very impressive, and to play them well is really miraculous.

The organist, Aarnoud de Groen, is someone new to me, but he plays this movement brilliantly. (One small criticism: I do wish he had chosen a more assertive registration for his left hand, as this line gets lost a bit in this recording. But that bottom manual is for the rückpositiv, the "chair organ" which is speaking out into the church from behind his back. If this recording comes from the camera, we're hearing less of this--and more of the organ's mechanical sounds--than someone out in the church proper.)