The Voice of the Gods

(Sorry for the picture. Old recording, so nothing else on the web to steal!)

Louis Vierne: Messe Solennelle Op. 16 for four-part mixed chorus and two organs
Connie Glessner, Fred Gramann, organ(s)
Choirs of Sacre-Coeur, Eglise Anglicane Saint-Michel, Eglise Americaine
Philippe Maze
Organ Works of Mulet, Tournemire, Hakim
Naji Hakim, organ
Motette CD 40081

***

When in Paris a decade ago, I attended a performance at La Madeleine (early evening on a weekday--people stopped by on their walk home from work for an hour of fabulous music; how cool is that?) that included the Messe Solennelle of Louis Vierne. Though I was already quite familiar with Vierne at that time, I had not heard this mass, and the combination of organ (famous Cavaillé-Coll) and organists (Francois-Henri Houbart and Yves Castagnet) and choir and venue and city and country captivated me utterly. Ten years later I still had not found a copy of that piece until now. When I saw it in the OHS catalog I snapped it up. Ironically, though I'm just finding it now, it was recorded 20 years ago--ten years prior to my visit.

This performance was recorded in the almost unbelievably vast Basilique du Sacre Coeur. The organ tears into the dour, dire opening chords of the Kyrie, thundering thru an acoustic which sounds like someone domed in the Grand Canyon. That acoustic is one of the star players here, and we are aware that it necessarily places huge demands on the organ builder. The challenges of having to fill with sound a space this vast must be quite an undertaking (something I thought about with the new Lynn Dobson instrument in Philadelphia's Verizon Hall, reviewed below). An organ, after all, is all about moving air, and large pipes and more pipes require more and more of it. (This is partly why an electronic organ will have trouble replicating a pipe organ: making and powering speakers which will move the volumes of air of a large pipe organ is a daunting and very expensive task--thus negating one of the expected advantages of going electric. You can get away with it in an intimate space, but vibrating the viscera of two thousand people a football field away from the source is another matter.)

The Sacre Coeur instrument is a Cavaillé-Coll originally constructed for a private residence in Biarritz (that guy was in a different line of work from me!) and moved to the cathedral in 1905, and it sounds like Cavaillé-Coll did every possible thing to get sonic horsepower out of the instrument. The reeds are brash to an almost cartoonish extreme, and the famous, shrill upperwork is there in spades. Even so, snarling beast that it is, the feeling is that it must grapple with the vast interior spaces, and the resulting sound is something different from your standard-issue organ recording, vast and mysterious and profound. This is the pipe organ at one end of the bell curve.

The organist at the Grand Organ here is Fred Gramann, someone of whom I've not heard. Turns out he hails from America originally, and studied in the late '70s with Marie-Claire Alain and my hero Maurice Duruflé. He is now the organist and Director of Music of the American Church in Paris. The Messe Solennelle features two organists at different instruments, and I do remember from the live performance I attended something of the interplay between the two performers. But the detail of that interplay is mostly lost in this vast acoustic. It's still a fabulous sound, but it seems difficult to determine different sonic sources.

In addition to the Vierne, we are treated to a few solo pieces, played by Naji Hakim, the successor to Olivier Messiaen at the organist's bench at l'eglise Ste. Trinité: a Toccata by Henri Mulet, the Prelude et Fresque of Charles Tournemire, and one of the organist's original compositions, a three-movement suite for organ called The Embrace of Fire. These seem as though they were recorded at a different time, and with different microphone placements.

For all the recordings of Cavaillé-Colls in and around Paris in my collection, this is the first time I've run across a recording in Sacre-Coeur. I saw the place when I was in Paris, but did not hear the instrument at that time. And for some reason it is not favored for recitals and recordings like those of Notre Dame, St. Sulpice and La Madeleine and St. Eustache (this last not a C-C, but magnificent just the same). So this was an especially auspicious find for me, and a thrilling addition to my collection.