The Do-Everything Machine

L'orgue à quatre visages: Jean-Christophe Geiser at the Op. 120 Fisk organ (2003) of Lausanne Cathedral, Switzerland
Loft Records, ORG-7210

Vincent Lübeck: Praeludium in d minor
Pierre Du Mage: Suite der 1er ton
Franz Liszt: Evocation a la Chapelle Sixtine
Maurice Duruflé: Suite pour orgue, Op. 5

***

Here's the first of a couple recent recordings of organs from my favorite American shop, CB Fisk of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Their Op. 120 for Lausanne Cathedral in Switzerland is one of the first major pipe organs from America to be installed in a classic European cathedral. And it's a major work from the Fisk firm, both in size and location and in the ambition of its design. (An article about the organ from the NYT can be found here.)

In the liner notes for this CD, Wolfram Adolph writes:

To perform a wide range of repertoire in concerts and in the protestant services in the cathedral, the new organ contains four different musical style options in one great cathedral organ: the French classic style of Francois-Henri Cliquot, north German sounds of the polyphonic Hanseatic aesthetics of the 17th and 18th centuries, typical French symphonic colors after Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811-1899) and German romantic stops in the style of Friedrich Ladegast.

So this instrument is effectively four disparate organs in one case, which is a fascinating idea. Fisk was one of the earliest firms in this country to embrace tracker action and non-equal temperaments. They have built a whole host of beautiful and artistic instruments over the years, covering a pretty wide philosophical range, from small organs tuned to quarter-comma meantone, to the snarling behemoth in Dallas's Meyerson Symphony Center. In the last decade they built a fabulous instrument for Oberlin college that sought to copy the construction and tonal design of the great 19th Century French organ builder, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. This organ for Lausanne Cathedral continues in this daring and experimental vein.

Based on this recording, this organ is another triumph for Fisk. The instrument, and Lausanne Cathedral organist Jean-Christophe Geiser, acquit themselves beautifully in all this repertoire, and I'm eager to hear more of the instrument. I love these experiments, where modern instruments are, to varying degrees, built to the standards and practices of other eras--an expensive and painstaking undertaking with a large pipe organ. But I must also confess to a bit of schizophrenia about this particular instrument and particularly its four-in-one mission. Much as I love the idea of it, I'm not convinced that this experiment contributes much to the organ's success. A bit of a digression might help me make my point.

I had similar feelings about Fisk's lovely organ at Oberlin College (their Op. 116). It's a really magnificent musical instrument, though not, near as I can tell, because it purports to be what Cavaillé-Coll might have built. The instrument has a French accent, but I'd never mistake it for a C-C. Some of this, as I said in that review, is surely the acoustic--Finney Chapel is very dry. But a big part of the reason I'm not fooled is (forgive me for repeating myself) the relative smoothness of the Fisk's voicing compared to the big C-Cs in, say, St. Ouen and St. Sulpice. C-C's large instruments have a shocking snarl at tutti, almost a harshness, which comes from their very brash reeds and shrill upperwork. These elements incongruously contribute to the organ's glorious sound. The Oberlin Fisk makes plenty of volume, but with these rough edges smoothed away the organ sounds closer to their own Meyerson instrument in Dallas than the Cavaillé-Colls they purport to copy. It's less a function of the subtle voicing of stops and more of the large-scale characteristics of how C-C made power, I think.

Fisk's goal with the Lausanne instrument of doing justice to four different styles is impossible for me to judge as I might judge a Cavaillé-Coll replica (beyond saying all the pieces here sound lovely). But I just wonder what this experiment amounts to in practice, whether it's really possible to cobble together four proper instruments of these periods and have them play well together without so much massaging that nothing meaningful of the four original styles remains.

This in turn raises questions about what compromises are necessary to "faithfully" play widely-varied styles of organ music on a single instrument, and whether those compromises in the end fail to do full justice to any of the styles. It's exactly because Cavaillé-Coll (or Ernest M. Skinner, for that matter) was pursuing his own tonal ideas--and not trying to honor others'--that his instruments are so distinctive; he was less constrained by having to do justice to other musical styles, since he was deeply immersed in a vibrant, modern movement--one which we now revisit and design organs to mimic.

This Fisk at Lausanne sounds lovely and impressive and all of a piece. But none of the separate styles sound to my ear more than a hint or suggestion. Like the Finney Chapel organ, this is an impressive instrument in its own right, but I don't think it owes its success to its stylistic experiment. Still, success is success, and I give all credit to the Fisk shop for taking a challenge like this on and making a top-shelf run at it.

Where I Get Lost On My Way to the Review

Pas De Dieu - Music Sublime & Spirited
Janette Fishell, organ
C. B. Fisk, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Greenville NC, 2005
Loft Records, LRCD-1082

Music of Franck, Vierne, Ferko, Litaize, Duruflé

***

The organs of C. B. Fisk are disproportionately represented in my CD collection. Partly this is because, as I noted in an earlier post, I've had a little personal contact with one or two of the firm's organs; but it's also because the firm has been so consistently innovative and adventurous in its choices and projects. Charles Fisk was among the earliest contemporary American organ builders to construct historically-informed neo-baroque instruments--including an instrument for Wellesley College (Op. 72, 1982) that featured quarter-comma meantone tuning, mutant keyboard and all. But far from confining themselves to that niche, the firm have also done many conventional church organs, big American Classic concert organs (e.g. Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas) and even earnest copies of the work of French great Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (Oberlin College, OH), and everything in between.

This wide range is not an unprecedented situation in the organ world. Several other firms which pop readily to mind--Flentrop of Holland, Marcussen of Denmark and the Austrian firm Rieger, just to name a few--have also dabbled in this cross-genre business. But none to my knowledge have gone so far as Fisk, whose range is nearly all-encompassing. This is kind of a double-edged sword, as it makes the task more difficult to know exactly what the firm stands for; and more than this, it would seem to make actual boundary-stretching innovation (as opposed to just visiting the existing genres) more difficult, as the company is not singularly focused. (I don't know--is it possible to innovate in an historical genre? Is the blending of genres an innovation anymore?) I love all the things Fisk have done, from their most radical neo-baroque experiment to their fabulous concert hall organ in Dallas; maybe that's all that matters.

One unifying thing among all of Fisk's instruments is the use of mechanical key action. (For the uninitiated, this means that each key of each keyboard has a direct, mechanical linkage to the pallet which admits air to the pipes speaking that note.) From his start in the 60s, Charles Fisk's commitment to mechanical action was a pretty radical departure from the norm. I don't know that Fisk have never made an electric action organ, but clearly tracker action is one of their things, and this choice informs everything else about the instrument, from layout to wind pressures to voicing. While an organist's touch does not affect the actual tonal quality of the sound produced, there is still thought by many to be an artistic connection formed between player and instrument by the intimacy of this mechanism.

The advances of the Electric Age--fully electric key action among them--changed organ building profoundly, enabling organs to be built of almost unlimited size and layout. A single rank of pipes could be made to serve several purposes, e.g. as a manual rank at 16' pitch, and, with an extension, as a 32' rank on the pedal; likewise, a rank could serve as both foundation and mutation by simple manipulation of wiring. And indeed we see these things, as well as much-improved console assists for the organist--e.g. crescendo pedals and multi-level combination actions--on the organs of Hook & Hastings and Ernest Skinner and others.

With antique instruments, of course, some kind of mechanical linkage was required--there was no other option. But the march of technology enabled larger and larger instruments, until we get to the behemoths like the Wanamaker Grand Court organ or the instruments at West Point or Atlantic City, which would be impossible without electric key action. Between the two extremes we have intermediate steps; although the big Cavaillé-Colls in France were still necessarily built with mechanical key action, they have pneumatic Barker machines to assist with what is after all a great mechanical load--I guess this is technically "tracker-pneumatic" action. The higher wind pressures of an orchestral organ make opening the pallets more difficult, and coupling the manuals together simply requires more force than a person can deftly provide. (In the interest of historical authenticity, Fisk's Cavaillé-Coll imitation at Oberlin College has a similar servo-assisted mechanical action, even though this must be a more expensive and complicated method of construction on a big instrument.)

We could easily have a discussion about the merits of mechanical-versus-electric action--and I seem to have run off in that direction. For our present purposes I mean only to note that Fisk have stayed with mechanical action throughout their wide range of instrument genres--including those genres where we might not expect to see it--and it's interesting to contemplate what other things fall into place because of this fundamental choice. With an instrument like theirs at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, mechanical action is a bit unexpected, and so we find a modern synthesis of styles. Likewise the Lynn Dobson concert hall organ at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia (among several others I can think of). Here we have an instrument with both a mechanical action console at the organ's case, and also a remote, electric-action console down on the stage. These things all represent relatively new territory.



The new organ on this release, the shop's Op. 126 from 2005 in St Paul's Episcopal Church in Greenville, NC, continues with Fisk's commitment to mechanical action. And it also builds on their research into Aristide Cavaillé-Coll's work for the firm's organ at Oberlin College. The Greenville organ is unapologetically French, but it's a bit lighter in tone than Oberlin and it benefits from a more sympathetic acoustic than the one at Oberlin. The excellence of this NC acoustic leads me to wonder (again) whether the "French-ness" of the instrument is in any way reliant on the acoustic--and again how big a handicap the acoustic was to the firm's aims at Oberlin.

Whatever the cause, this Greenville organ is particularly successful, offering a rare blend and unity of sound in a spectacularly beautiful package. The Fisk firm have many organs in their oeuvre to be proud of, but this is certainly one where everything came together beautifully.

This release features Janette Fishell, Distinguished Professor of Music at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, where she heads the Organ Performance and Sacred Music degree programs and is Chair of Keyboard Studies. The CD includes selections by Louis Vierne and Gaston Litaize, the lovely Priére by Cesar Franck (one of my favorite organ works), plus Duruflé's Prelude, Adagio and Choral Variations on Veni Creator. We also find a premier of the Livre d'orgue of longtime Chicago area resident and organist Frank Ferko (b. 1950). It's an excellent repertoire to show off the instrument, and Dr. Fishell's performances are vibrant and spot-on.

In Bach's time, the pipe organ was the most complicated, sophisticated machine with which people had regular contact. Today, the actual inner workings of a Yamaha synthesizer or something from the Kurzweill shop probably trump that claim, to say nothing of all the complex non-musical things that are part of our everyday lives. But a pipe organ is still a daunting undertaking, an endeavor requiring expertise in metals and woodworking, in design and acoustics, and increasingly in electronics as well. It's a field with deep roots back into history, foundations which strongly inform the industry present-day. There is a delight in knowing that no two are exactly the same, and even instruments which are similar on paper can be widely different in the flesh. This makes a new instrument's success contingent on many different threads. And while all organs fascinate me just by virtue of what they are, it's still a special thrill to find one where things make that rare convergence, like the focusing of a light with a magnifying glass.

Based, admittedly, on only one recording (albeit an excellent one), I think Fisk have given us a keeper.

Cesar Franck at Oberlin, Haskell Thomson

Franck: Haskell Thomson
Pro Organo CD 7152
The Kay Africa Memorial Organ (C.B. Fisk Opus 116)
Finney Chapel, Oberlin College

• Troisieme Choral en la mineur
  (1890)
• Prelude, Fugue et Variation, Op. 18
• Grande Piece Symphonique, Op. 17
• Trois Pieces (1878)
• --Fantaisie
• --Cantabile
• --Piece Heroique

***
A while back I wrote a post about a recording of J. Melvin Butler playing a new organ at Oberlin College, an instrument built by one of America's most iconic pipe organ builders, the firm of C. B. Fisk of Gloucester, MA. (The late Charles Fisk is an interesting character. After studying nuclear physics at Harvard, he opened his organ shop in 1961 and produced an impressive list of very innovative and progressive instruments until his death in 1983; the firm has continued to follow his principles.)

Apart from being a large instrument designed and built for an academic concert hall, this Oberlin instrument--their Opus 116--has the further distinction of having been built, as an experiment, according to the tonal principles of France's greatest organ builder, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811-1899). Cavaillé-Coll is responsible for nearly all of the famous instruments in Paris's great churches (Notre Dame, St. Sulpice, St. Clotilde, la Madeleine, St. Trinité), and many others, and he played an integral part in the flowering of this great compositional school from Cesar Franck onward to the present day. While the Fisk organ at Oberlin is not a copy of any particular Cavaillé-Coll instrument per se, it utilizes his ideas of what sounds ought to be represented in an instrument of this size--its stoplist--and it makes use of Cavaillé-Coll's technical specifications--wind pressures and pipe scalings. The idea, as I understand it, was to build a new instrument for a large American space that is a reasonable stab at what Cavaillé-Coll might have built. It's a fascinating idea, an experiment played out in a very elaborate and expensive arena.

That particular CD had a further twist. In addition to the works of Charles Tournemire played on this new instrument, a second disc was included where the recording engineers ran the digital data from the original recording thru a computer process which gave the organ an artificial acoustic. In effect, the computer was used to put the Oberlin organ into the acoustics of Chartres Cathedral (the acoustic at Finney Chapel is quite dry, and not at all like any acoustic where the existing Cavaillé-Coll instruments are found). The very idea of this, and the details of how they accomplished it, were incredibly captivating to me--and still are (and are covered a bit more in that earlier post).

All this by the way of preface. I recently got a disc of Haskell Thomson playing Cesar Franck on this Oberlin Fisk organ (though without any acoustic processing). Thomson is Professor of Organ at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and a specialist in this repertoire. And it gives me another organist recording another composer on this instrument, captured by another recording engineer and released on another label--these all help to gain a fuller picture of exactly what the instrument is like. (And I ordered yet another disc of this instrument--with yet another performer--but it's on backorder. I will review that disc when I get it.)

Professor Thomson is very effective in this repertoire. There is an inherent gravity in this music, and I feel it is much easier to play too quickly than too slowly. Thomson hits down the center of the fairway, leaning just slightly toward slow and stately. This seems quite correct to me, and he is convincing. For the huge esteem in which the composer is held, Cesar Franck's whole output for the organ fits on two CDs; and so Professor Thomson gives us about half of the oeuvre, a good cross-section of Franck's work.

I have many recordings of this repertoire, and my primary interest in the recording is the instrument itself. This new recording brings some confirmation to my suspicions from the first recording. Well, it does and it doesn't. I have quite a number of recordings of the organs of Cavaillé-Coll, and my familiarity with them and my love of their sound was my primary motivation for going to Paris a decade ago: to see and hear these instruments first-hand. And I have to say that, to my ears, neither recording of this Fisk "copy" of Cavaillé-Coll's work sounds particularly like the C-Cs I have heard. Not even with the signal processing, however fabulous and effective that part of the exercise was.

Don't misunderstand me: this is a magnificent musical instrument in its own right. It sounds fantastic in this French repertoire, though the room is maybe a bit unfortunate. But I just don't think in some kind of blind test I would have any confusion about which was the Fisk and which was the Cavaillé-Coll. Professor Thomson registers the organ in a way that makes the C-C illusion more convincing than it was the first time around, which then begs the question of what HIS recording would sound like if acoustically processed. But still, I think I would not be fooled. That raises many questions about what details big and small are really responsible for Cavaillé-Coll's signature sound: the stoplist? The building itself? The materials used in the pipes? Or is it a matter of the very subtle voicing of the individual stops?

(C.B. Fisk's Opus 116 at Oberlin College)

One of my first and lasting impressions with the work of Cavaillé-Coll was his unexpected method of bringing power to the sound of his instruments. He voiced his big reed stops to be quite obnoxious in their tone. Played by themselves, they sound just this side of noise. But as a foundation for a large body of stops being played simultaneously, the brashness imparts a huge majesty and harmonic richness that is quite unexpected. Likewise the high frequency upperwork. Organs sound so rich because they don't have to rely, as most instruments do, on the natural occurrence of harmonics; pipes can simply be built to SPEAK the notes you might otherwise hope would show up as harmonics. And again, Cavaillé-Coll was not shy about this. Some of his mutations and mixtures are loud to the point of being shrill.

The idea of achieving something of transporting beauty by way of harsh or ugly elements is ingenious (like the painter Chaim Soutine, whose crude globs of paint nonetheless form, if one steps back a bit, a moving image). Without the ensemble beneath them, these ranks are quite painful to listen to; but mixed in with a mass of more conventional organ sound, they take your breath away with a richness which is like a whole sonic universe opening before you.

Neither of these rather counter-intuitive elements--harsh reeds and shrill upperwork--seem to be present in the Oberlin Fisk. It's almost as though someone decided they could smooth off the rough edges, and left the essential character in shavings on the floor in the process. But the acoustic may be playing a role in this. Because the absence of reverberation is so striking in this recording compared to any CD featuring a Cavaillé-Coll instrument, it's an open question to me what role the huge cathedral acoustics play in the overall sound of these organs. While the Fisk company has made use of Cavaillé-Coll's pipe scales and other technical information (wind pressures, windchest designs, key action), it seems that some other element must be involved, some final step which Cavaillé-Coll took which put his indelible stamp on his work.

In timbre and performance, this Haskell Thomson survey of Franck's music makes a great addition to an enthusiast's music collection, and it's a good choice for introducing the repertoire to the unfamiliar.