Duruflé reviews

The legendary compositional fastidiousness of Maurice Duruflé means that the complete works for organ can be encompassed on one CD. The reward for the listener is a distilled corpus of some of the richest, most innovative and satisfying music ever written for the instrument. Joining Olivier Latry (BNL), Hans Fagius (BIS), John Scott (Hyperion), Stefan Schmidt (Aeolus) and a number of others as Duruflé anthologist is Friedhelm Flamme, church music director of the Göttingen diocese in Germany.

Thomas Trotter, celebrating his 20th year as Birmingham city organist, is also organist in residence at Symphony Hall, and opens his recital on its magnificent new Klais organ with the obligatory Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Like his illustrious predecessor in Birmingham, George Thalben-Ball, he doesn’t hang about making unwarranted melodramatic gestures in the Toccata. It sounds urgent and thrilling, likewise the beautifully articulated Fugue and Lemare’s inventive transcription of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre.

Adding another Duruflé oeuvre intégrale to the catalogue alongside those of Olivier Latry, Pierre Pincemaille, Todd Wilson and John Scott, this one commends itself on a number of counts, though ultimately cedes to any of these predecessors. In places the Swedish player Hans Fagius hits upon a spontaneous and improvisatory quality, so vital for this slimly structured music, notably in the Adagio of the Veni creator and in the Prelude et fugue sur le nom d’Alain. The pacing of the build-up in the latter’s Fugue is notably well managed.

The star of this disc by the enterprising young group Conchord could be viola-player Douglas Paterson, who is in every piece but one (the sleeve mistakenly substitutes him with a cello in the Duruflé) and avenges all those cruel viola jokes with some excellent playing. His finest moment is possibly Loeffler’s Five Songs for voice, viola and piano, in which he negotiates fiendish double-stopping and other pitfalls with consummate deftness.

It is fortunate that Jehan Alain left to the musical world such an enriching legacy of compositions before he was killed in action in 1940 at the age of 29. The present recording by Eric Lebrun, part of a projected complete survey of Alain’s organ works, comes as a timely reminder of the breadth and command of Alain’s musical language. The three-manual Cavaillé-Coll organ used for this recording is not a vast instrument, but possesses a wonderful range of colours that breathes life into these works.

Along with Biggs and the younger Zamkochian, Virgil Fox (1912-80) helped define the modern American concert organist. Taped in Riverside Church, New York (1955 Aeolian-Skinner), this collection features music by Dupré (his teacher in Paris), Vierne, Franck, Massenet, Godard, Boëllmann and Duruflé. Expressively, the Franck may be a shade sanctimonious, but Duruflé’s Op. 5 Suite is theatrically charged and features even more high-octane virtuosity than Boëllmann’s Gothique Toccata.

Two discs by Cambridge-based choirs confirm the city’s reputation as a centre of excellence. The high standard of the mixed choir of Clare College is no surprise: with so few posts for female choral scholars, who could wonder at the concentrated excellence of the top line? But Kibblewhite’s Cambridge Chorale, in only its fourth year of existence, is similarly impressive.

The best things are the ‘Pie Jesu’ solos: Popp sophisticated and secular, Te Kanawa warmer and franker. Otherwise, the Fauré turns slow, bland and bourgeois in an over-Anglican way, despite the professional chorus. Nimsgern sounds wobbly and wan. Davis is less inhibited nowadays but, even twenty years ago, the more innocent and expansive Duruflé loosened him up so that the big moments achieve their proper thrills, while the prevailing calmer moods remain tender, rather than chilly.

Robert Maycock

Can it really be two decades since Ted Perry, famously financing his shoe-string operation by driving a taxi, began Hyperion? In that time his company has gained a reputation for its enterprising choice of repertoire, always based on musical considerations rather than on those of current popularity. These half-dozen reissues from its special Top 20 anniversary edition, represent some of the best of that diverse work, given by some of the groups who have made their names on the back of Hyperion’s enterprise.

Tavener’s Song to Athene, made famous by the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997, adds a royal touch to 20th-century religious choral music which, to quote the notes, ‘more and more people have come to enjoy as an escape from the pressures and stresses of modern life’. Better still if those people actually got together to sing it.

David Briggs has already established a reputation as a fine recitalist and transcriber of orchestral scores for organ, as witnessed on previous Priory releases. As the title of the disc suggests, here he is given free rein to display his considerable versatility in a programme designed to show off the four-manual Hill, Norman and Beard Gloucester Cathedral organ recently rebuilt by Nicholson and Co.

Durufle’s Requiem started life as a series of organ meditations on the texts of the Mass of the Dead which he later amplified into a full-blown setting for two soloists, chorus and orchestra. But he also produced a version with organ accompaniment, and it is that which Decca reissues in a somnolent performance from St John’s College, Cambridge. The acoustic suits the work, however, and equally the companion Fauré Requiem (spiritual ancestor of Duruflé’s piece), though again the reading is ponderous.

Durufle’s Requiem started life as a series of organ meditations on the texts of the Mass of the Dead which he later amplified into a full-blown setting for two soloists, chorus and orchestra. But he also produced a version with organ accompaniment, and it is that which Decca reissues in a somnolent performance from St John’s College, Cambridge. The acoustic suits the work, however, and equally the companion Fauré Requiem (spiritual ancestor of Duruflé’s piece), though again the reading is ponderous.

Durufle’s Requiem started life as a series of organ meditations on the texts of the Mass of the Dead which he later amplified into a full-blown setting for two soloists, chorus and orchestra. But he also produced a version with organ accompaniment, and it is that which Decca reissues in a somnolent performance from St John’s College, Cambridge. The acoustic suits the work, however, and equally the companion Fauré Requiem (spiritual ancestor of Duruflé’s piece), though again the reading is ponderous.

The 16 trebles and nine lay clerks of Manchester Cathedral Choir are trained to a fine level of ensemble, and for Naji Hakim their musicianship clearly proved inspirational when composing his Messe solennelle, commissioned by Manchester’s Dean and Chapter for the year 2000. The most recent of three Masses by Olivier Messiaen’s successor at the church of La Trinité, it is a late flowering of the venerable French organ school.

Christian von Blohn is a deanery music director in the Rheinland, and by all accounts they should be very proud of him. His eclectic disc of French symphonic organ music is an unexpected gem, demonstrating a range more usually associated with ‘big-name’ performers. The repertoire is mostly familiar party-pieces, but in each of them is a glint of something fresh and unvisited. Alain’s Litanies lives up to its ‘tornado’ epithet, and Widor’s hackneyed Toccata is portrayed in glittering terms, a speeding bullet from the first bar to the last.