Franck--Yankee-Style

Cesar Franck: Organ Works
Frank Speller, organ
Gothic Records, G 49125
2001

***
This is an interesting recording, one from a few years ago but a recent acquisition for me.

Cesar Franck is the Godfather of the extraordinarily fecund compositional (and performance and improvisational) movement surrounding, in the main, six or seven large cathedrals in Paris from around 1850 thru 1950 and beyond. The movement generated great interest and respect for its practitioners throughout Europe and beyond, and these church posts--which are municipal positions--usually combined with teaching positions in Paris's Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in composition and harmony and solfege and improvisation, and made for some very fertile soil for the production of musical art at its highest level.

Symbiotically intertwined with this compositional school was a similar flowering in organ-building technology and philosophy, reaching its pinnacle in the person of one Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (as discussed in this post). The magnificent sounds of these elaborate symphonic organs are indelibly linked to the compositions which they inspired. Anyone familiar with the music of Cesar Franck will automatically find their mind's ear reproducing the distinctive tones of Cavaillé-Coll's great instruments in St. Sulpice or La Madeleine or Trinité.

But there are a lot of organs in the world which Cavaillé-Coll did not build, and I have many recordings of this repertoire on American and other European organs as well. Rather like the music of Bach, it turns out that Franck sounds wonderful on tones other than what he had in mind when he penned these works. Different, but still profound and moving and fabulous. As alluded to in the aforementioned earlier post, the symphonic organs of Ernest M. Skinner and the Aeolian-Skinner organ company, among others, produce very appropriate and convincing sounds for this repertoire. But what if we go further afield?

Our present recording gives us about half of Franck's major compositions played on a 1983 Visser-Rowland organ installed in the Bates Recital hall of the University of Texas, Austin. The organist is Frank Speller, the Associate Professor Emeritus of organ and harpsichord at UT. The instrument is noteworthy for not having any French inclinations nor for being especially symphonic in the Aeolian-Skinner or Cavaillé-Coll vein. But it's a fairly large instrument and certainly possessed of adequate tonal resources to play big works like these, and organ builder Pieter Visser has his own ideas about what an organ is supposed to sound like.

The acoustic of the Bates Recital Hall is certainly dryer and closer than Paris's large cathedrals, and this organ is designed and voiced accordingly. That acoustic cuts both ways: these sounds are not as thunderous as those needed to fill a space ten times as large, but neither are they blended by the building's acoustic and swallowed up. The artist is free to play intricate passages at the tempo that they deem appropriate, without having to accommodate the reverberation. And mostly I think Dr. Speller has done just that, and very convincingly. In its space, the organ has great power and the fiery reed stops in tutti are almost French in their brashness.

My own conviction is that it's much easier to play most music too fast than too slow, and several of these passages come off almost as though he's late for an appointment elsewhere. There are things other than grandeur and majesty in large-scale organ works, but if you take those elements away you are left with a limited palette. After all, Franck wrote these pieces from the console of his Cavaillé-Coll in the Eglise Ste. Clotilde, and their very conception--tempo and pacing and all--naturally conforms to this reality. That's my ear, anyway.

But my real interest here is in the instrument, and in this choice of an instrument for this repertoire. The instrument sports mechanical key action, something even Cavaillé-Coll could not manage without a Barker Lever assist. And the stoplist and tonal sensibilities are much more Dutch than French. So how does it work? Really well, actually. The instrument's voicing, as well as the case-focusing which is part of the North German Werkprinzip (again, a very different instrumental aesthetic), gives everything a great clarity--you can hear and identify every individual pipe, it seems. And that makes for a revealing transparency and independence of line, and for very distinctive solo sounds.

It's immediately clear that this is not Cesar Franck's instrument. But just as we play Bach on a modern Steinway and marvel at his compositions, we can listen to Franck on a modern instrument and see more clearly what is Franck versus the sepia-tone contributions of Cavaillé-Coll or Paris herself.