French Mode: Jared Johnson on the Kay Africa Memorial organ,
Finney Chapel, Oberlin College.
Pro Organo CD 7153
- Widor: Symphony No. 5 in F Major, Op. 42, No. 1
- Dupre: Prelude and Fugue in f minor, Op. 7
- Alain: Danse Funebre pour Honorer une Memoire Heroique
- Hakim: Symphony in Three Movements
***
As promised, here are my two cents' worth about Jared Johnson's recording of more French music on the new Fisk organ at Oberlin college, one modeled after Cavaillé-Coll. Posts discussing the organ itself are to be found here and here.
Jared Johnson is a graduate of Oberlin College, and a student of Thomas Murray and Haskell Thomson. He is currently Assistant Organist and Choirmaster of Trinity Churcy on the Green in new Haven, Connecticut, and Director of Music of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.
This is a nice sampling of a good 80 years of Parisian organ history, moving chronologically from Widor's famous Fifth Symphony of 1887, to one of Marcel Dupré's Preludes and Fugues from 1914 (Dupré was Widor's successor at St. Sulpice), to a lesser-known piece from 1938 of Jean Alain, the very talented young Parisian composer who was killed early in the Second World War, and finishing with the Symphony en trois mouvements of 1984 by Naji Hakim, who is the present titular organist at Trinité in Paris, taking the post after the death in 1993 of Olivier Messiaen.
Especially after the recently-reviewed recording by Frank Speller of Cesar Franck on a Dutch-inspired instrument in Texas, it's most interesting to me to come back to this fascinating Fisk organ and to hear yet another organist's take on this earnest American replica of a French instrument. After the Visser-Rowland of Frank Speller's recording, this Fisk does indeed sound French in comparison, and certainly it sounds magnificent in this repertoire (which is not meant as any criticism of the Speller disc, which is wonderful and illuminating on its own). The very dry acoustic of Finney Chapel enables one to hear the details of this music with greater clarity than is typical, and the instrument has impressive power and range.
Jared Johnson is an accomplished, assured organist, and he does great justice to these pieces. The technical fireworks of Widor's famous Toccata from the Fifth Symphony (the second most famous and recognized piece for the organ after Bach's d minor Toccata and Fugue) are rendered with such clarity that it's almost like having a magic trick demonstrated and explained. The exact rollicking interplay between the hands and the feet in this movement have never been so clearly revealed. Dupré's quiet Prelude and measured Fugue from his Op. 7 take us half a century into the future from the Widor, and give the organ a chance to show off another group of colors from the previous piece. Both the Hakim Symphony and the Alain are new pieces for me. Johnson uses the organ's full range, and the pieces are registered with confident authenticity.
This makes three recordings for me on this instrument, covering Franck, Tournemire, and now this disc of four other eminent Frenchmen. And the more I hear of it the more it impresses me and convinces me that it was a really worthwhile experiment. However much I'm coming to love the sound of the instrument, I'm still not quite fooled into thinking it's the work of Cavaillé-Coll, and I'd love to figure out why not. (I'm writing this review in the absence of my CD collection--though I have the music with me on iTunes--so the answers may well be there in the liner notes.)
This instrument has it all: a fascinating pedigree, a really wonderful sonic character, and now a stable of fine recordings to show it off to a wider audience. And we're all beneficiaries.
3 comments:
"However much I'm coming to love the sound of the instrument, I'm still not quite fooled into thinking it's the work of Cavaillé-Coll, and I'd love to figure out why not."
I think we discussed this about a month ago. In building an instrument of this size, C-C would have never encountered a room such as this former Protestant preaching hall. If he had encountered such a meager and challenging acoustic, I dare say what would have emerged would probably not be what we hear in a St. Ouen, St. Sernin, or St. Sulpice.
The aesthetic of these places and Oberlin are at completely opposite ends of the spectrum.
My 2 cents!
David
I think you're quite right here.
But this leads to a couple follow-on questions: what would C-C have done with a room like this? And would it have sounded like the instruments we know and love, but translated to the dead acoustic, or would he have gone off in a totally different direction? Surely his brilliance is not acoustic-related. But what would he have done for a dead hall? Fascinating question!
In the absence of evidence, Fisk would have been charged with making choices they thought C-C would have made--a dicey proposition. Instead, they seemed to have just plunked a fair copy of a generic C-C into a very uncharacteristic room. This maybe makes for too many variables to judge the results, except on its own merits.
I actually think the acoustics are so dead in the hall at Oberlin that I would have questioned putting any organ in there, let alone a copy of one designed to fill an immense space.
I have a post above about the 2000 North German instrument from GOArt, and it turns out they've done their own C-C imitation in Goteborg, and I have that CD on order. I'm very curious to see how their experiment comes off!
Agree with everything you wrote.
Mercifully, what we know of C-C's output on a monumental scale is NOT in sepulchral preaching halls.
It's anyone's guess what his organs might have sounded like, had he done all his work in Boston, Mass or Paducah, KY.
It's moot really, is what I'm trying to say.
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