Why Does It Sound That Way?

Of course, now that the music blog is dead I'm inspired to write about music. (Perfect way to guarantee continued anonymity.) The domain name for TheToneBigot.com has expired, though the site remains. But I expect at some point I'll go there and the link will no longer work. Anyway.

***

Guilmant: Complete Organ Sonatas
MDG Dabringhaus & Grimm MDG 316 0340-2
Ben Van Oosten at St. Ouen, Rouen


Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911) was a prolific composer for the organ as well as a teacher and virtuoso performer. He held the titular organist's chair at Trinité in Paris for 30 years (the same chair held 30 years later by Olivier Messiaen) and taught organ at the Conservatoire. These eight Sonatas are really a collection of multi-movement suites very much along the lines of what Vierne and Widor would later call Organ Symphonies--and what César Franck experimented with in his single-movement Grand Piéce Symphonique. The harmonic language is firmly tonal and reminiscent of Franck (who was only 15 years Guilmant's senior). Melodies are strong (though Franck is a tough act to follow in this regard) and Guilmant shows a masterly sense of how to make the organ sound and to work its resources.

I'm familiar with Ben Van Oosten, having his complete cycle of Widor symphonies. I see he has an extensive catalog of recordings, including the complete works of Marcel Dupré in 12 volumes (among other things). After his initial training in the Netherlands, he came to Paris to study with Andre Isoir and Daniel Roth. He has a superb feel for this French repertoire and his performances here are really excellent, feeling and technically perfect. His tempi are stately without dragging in any way, and he rises to the grandeur of the pieces in most convincing fashion. This instrument is said to be difficult to record, as the acoustic is vast and plays havoc with one's attempts to capture the "real" instrument. But MDG has done their usual fine work, and the disc is a sonic delight. Happily recommended.

***

Much as I appreciate the repertoire and its presentation, the real star for me is this magnificent organ. Built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1890, the organ at the Cathedral of St. Ouen in Rouen is a singularity, a true masterpiece. It was Cavaillé-Coll's last instrument, its dedication recital, by Widor, occurring a year after his death. Despite rebuildings in 1941 and 1955, the organ exists virtually in its original state and it lives in a space that is tailor-made for organ music--indeed, St. Ouen is no longer used as a church, but rather exists as an art space, a museum to gothic architecture, and concert hall (the best possible use of a place like this).

This instrument in St. Ouen is typically cited along with that in St. Sulpice in Paris (1862) as being the greatest works of probably the world's greatest organ builder. Cavaillé-Coll built magnificent instruments for many of Paris's great churches (most of which are now quite altered and all of which have their strengths) but these two are large instruments in expansive acoustics, and both exist in something close to their original states (his famous organ for Notre Dame in Paris has been extensively altered, though it remains an impressive musical instrument).

I can't field this acclaim without feeling, nestled like a Russian doll, the further question of what makes an organ great. I've harped on these themes before, I know, but listening to this instrument in St. Ouen raises fundamental questions about how organ sound works, about what an organ is supposed to sound like and how this sound relates to historical models and existing repertoire. There are no absolute answers to these questions, of course, only established practices. The pipe organ is an intrinsically conservative instrument, with a huge and historic body of music composed for it which any new instrument must accommodate, and this simple fact makes innovation difficult or at least slow-moving. Innovative present-day builders (I think of the American firm C.B. Fisk, for example) must make their mark by doing the expected things with excellence while introducing innovations at a measured pace.

Recent innovations in organ design (setting aside the growth of electronic sound production in the organ world) have been more technological than sonic: taking big concert hall organs as representative of the state of the art, most now feature a mechanical console and a second, flexible console that connects to the instrument electronically; most now have a recording system that allows performances to be captured and recreated in minute detail; most now have computerized control of the pistons which allow for large-scale changes in registration and setting. But sonically, a large modern organ must pay homage to what has come before it, to allow the instrument to do justice to Bach and Buxtehude, to de Grigny and Clerambault, to Franck and Widor and Vierne and Messiaen, to Sowerby and Herbert Howells, and to allow new composers the flexibility and versatility to venture out in new directions.

But when we listen to the great organs of history we are often hearing something quite new. I think of Cavaillé-Coll in this, naturally--the brilliant compositional Parisian school that I so adore arising from César Franck and continuing onto the present day literally owes its very existence to Cavaillé-Coll's vision and work--but also of America's Ernest M. Skinner. Neither builder was re-inventing what an organ was or the fundamentals of how it was supposed to sound, exactly, and yet both created a distinctive sonic world that changed the instruments that followed. They weren't trying necessarily to perfect somebody else's vision of what an organ was supposed to be; they had their own ideas and they pushed them out into the world. And in this way they carved out a niche for themselves in this long history of folks building these complicated machines.

When I listen to the organ at St. Ouen, I'm always a little shocked by how brash the sound is. It strikes me every time, even when I know it's coming. The organ is large, but not excessively so--64 stops and 84 ranks over four manuals and pedal (the organ at St. Sulpice is considerably larger--102/137 on five manuals and pedal), but it speaks into an immense, reverberant space. It has beautiful and varied solo stops, as expected. But given that organ sound is as much felt as heard, and that a certain volume is expected as a component of the awe the organ inspires in people, it's the task of filling so large a space that seems so challenging. Especially in 1890. So how does he do it?

This, to me, is his secret: he is not afraid to use rather ugly sounds in pursuit of a beautiful and awesome whole. Specifically, the big pedal reeds--and the upperwork needed to balance them--are really shocking in their harshness. French organ reeds are known for being brash and aggressive, but the big pedal reeds on this instrument are actually violent. Played on their own, I can't imagine most people thinking "that's a great, musical sound for an organ." It's an assault on the ears! Likewise the mixtures and other high-pitched stops that provide the organ's harmonic development: these are shrill, almost painful sounds on their own. But like Einstein looking at the world and realizing that reality is really something other than what it appears to be, Cavaillé-Coll was able to see that the roughness of these sounds would be smoothed out a bit by the rest of the tutti, and their edges would give shape and character to the sound overall. It's an odd concept to me; I'm used to thinking about non-solo registers as being good blending sounds, as being not terribly distinctive but useful for giving weight and body to the organ's massed sound. But here is one of the master builders giving non-solo registers an assertive, non-blending character, a character that intuition tells us will not play well with others. And yet here we are.

It's this violence that stays with me. The scale of the pedal reeds, especially the Bombarde 16' and Contre-Bombarde 32', seems absolutely immense, again almost to the point of producing non-musical sounds. I'd love to know the deliberations on how the scale was arrived at. In any organ the 16' and 32' pedal reeds will likely sound a bit anti-social on their own, but in this case the effect is extreme. For all the power of a big organ like the Skinner at Woolsey Hall or the Fisk organ at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, I've never heard volume and power made in the way this Cavaillé-Coll does it.

It's the rarity of this approach, and this instrument's inclusion on every list of the world's greatest organs convinces me these two things are related. I feel now like I must prioritize getting to see the instrument in peson.

Organ Adventures

I've had amazing luck with organ matters. On my first visit to Paris, I stumbled upon several amazing things, culminating with my being invited to the organ loft at St. Sulpice to observe Sophie-Veronique Cauchefer-Choplin improvising through a service. I was similarly lucky on Susan's and my visit to Paris a decade later.

In New York last year as Susan and I walked back to our hotel we passed the open doors of a church near Times Square (The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin on 46th St. between Sixth and Seventh) and I heard the unmistakable sounds of Duruflé. I dashed across the street to hear the final minute or so of the Op. 4 Veni Creator Variations. I didn't go inside at that time--it was the postlude and everyone was leaving the building--but I thought the instrument sounded very congenial for French repertoire and made a mental note to investigate the building and its organ.

It only took the passage of another year and another reminder. This past week we were back in Manhattan leading our yearly tour, and I was out wandering on a free evening. And I passed the same church again and--lo and behold--this time I heard Mendelssohn coming out the open doors. (It almost seemed like a sign!) This time I went in. It turns out a visiting organist from Washington, D.C., one Julie Vidrick Evans, was practicing for a concert to be played the next day (alas, we would be headed back to WI by then), so I stuck around for a couple hours and listened--two different Mendelssohn movements and Dupré's Op. 7 Prelude and Fugue in B Major. Ms. Evans was very accomplished, and her practicing was not to master the pieces but rather the instrument--she was trying out registrations and setting pistons, trying to make the best use of the instrument's many resources. For a listener wanting to learn about a specific organ, this is maybe better than listening to the recital itself; one can hear different stops in quick succession and see how they interact.

The organ turns out to be something considerably more than just a random instrument on a random street in a random church--I'm a little surprised I hadn't heard of it before now. In the church's dark interior it was hard to get a very clear look at the instrument. And after my eyes adjusted I was surprised at what I saw: an instrument that looked half-finished and then left that way for several decades. I thought at first it might be an early Holtkamp; the pipework was entirely exposed. But the layout of the pipes and their dull metallic composition convinced me the instrument was not intended to look this way. I really had never seen anything like it.

(What I could see as my eyes adjusted.)

More astonishing than what it looked like was what it actually IS: I did some searching on my iPhone as I sat there and my jaw dropped to learn that the instrument came not from Cleveland but from the workshops of Aeolian-Skinner in 1932 as its Opus 891 (extended a decade later to become Op. 891-A). Consulting my biography of Ernest M. Skinner back at home, I learned that Op. 891-A was notorious as the first example of what became known as the "American Classic" style, a style which moved away from the blatant orchestral imitation for which the Skinner firm was known and toward a more historically-informed tonal design. Ernest M. Skinner was still at the helm of the firm which bore his name, but Op. 891-A was a product of the man who was leading what amounted to a hostile takeover of Skinner's firm, the Englishman G. Donald Harrison. Op. 891-A was a modern and innovative organ in its day--innovation of which Ernest M. Skinner rather strongly disapproved--and the instrument marked a decisive turn of the firm away from its founder.

(I love that despite the arguments about arcane details, any well-designed and -executed organ sounds lovely and of a piece in its setting. Skinner's instruments--say, the masterpiece in Woolsey Hall at Yale University--seem noteworthy now not for their ability to imitate a symphony orchestra, but for their tonal innovations and masterful construction and for the coherence of their designer's tonal vision. Harrison's Op. 891-A is not, as it happens, an instrument Skinner wanted his firm to build, but it strikes us as a unified and glorious instrument in its space--and, with more than a little irony, it still sounds very much like the kind of big, orchestral organ that was in vogue 80 years ago when compared to the extremes to which the historical movement went in the ensuing half century).

In fact the instrument sounds fantastic in the middling-reverberation space, and the sounds are very congenial indeed for French repertoire. It's a large instrument (93 stops on four manuals and pedal) and it fills the space very ably--the tutti is almost painful. The space itself is reverberant enough to help the organ blend, yet intimate enough to hear details and to appreciate the instrument's full dynamic range. The stoplist I saw on some church literature did not mention any 32' flue pipes on the organ, but there is a big reed on the pedal which is quite overwhelming; it was fun to hear the practicing recitalist try passages with and without the Bombarde. (The AGO site shows two 32' flues: a Salicional and a Bourdon.)

(The console, typical of Skinners of the day. This console layout is one of the enduring legacies of Ernest M. Skinner.)

Overall the sound seemed a touch lighter than with other Skinners with which I'm familiar. I'm used to an Aeolian-Skinner featuring huge scales and a very wide-open tone, and this instrument struck me as being a bit slighter in its tonal composition. (Not that anyone would call this instrument "slight." I'd be curious to know if there's anything in this or if it was just a quirk of my ear on this day.)

And so a fun discovery: my research shows the instrument to be rather famous, and one of the new breed of virtuoso organists, one Cameron Carpenter, has recorded a live recital on just the instrument. (It's downloading as I type this, and perhaps I'll have two cents' worth about it later.)

Lastly, a word on the instrument's facade. I spoke the following morning to the church's organist, a young Englishman named James Kennerly, and he had a few details about the instrument's history (plus there's a great rundown of the instrument's history on the New York AGO website here, including sketches of what the intended facade was to look like). It seems no one ever intended the instrument to look as it does, but budgets were tight and what money was available was always prioritized into completing the intended specification; when the money was finally found, the instrument's looks had become something of a trademark and it was decided to leave well enough alone.

(A photo from the web with much better lighting than mine.)

With a mechanical-action instrument, the arrangement of pipes follows the mechanics of the windchests, which route wind more or less uniformly to the individual ranks, lined up by keyboard position (though it must be said that facade pipes will often be arranged separately for aesthetic purposes, and even dummy pipes used to achieve a desired look). With an electric or electro-pneumatic action like this A-S, pipes can be put anywhere wind can be routed to them, and so it's interesting to see how an instrument is laid out--which pipes are under expression and which not. This particular organ is most unusual in having all this exposed to the audience. Walter Holtkamp's experiments with completely exposed pipework were rather controversial in their day, though a number of firms have built at least the occasional instrument with this feature. But to my knowledge Aeolian-Skinner was not one of them. And that makes it even more special and rare.

Another great entry for my organ serendipity ledger!

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.

A Thing to Celebrate

Now Let Us Rejoice: Organ Hymns for the Sabbath
John Longhurst, Clay Christiansen and Richard Elliott
The Schoenstein Organ at the LDS Conference Center, Salt Lake City
Intellectual Reserve, Inc.
2006

***

I'm a bit behind the power curve on this release as well.

A couple years ago on a Salt Lake City layover I made a visit to the Mormon Tabernacle to see the famous 1947 Aeolian-Skinner organ there--arguably the single most famous instrument from arguably America's most notorious organ building concern--actually, it's probably the single most famous pipe organ in America.

What I did not know was that at that moment I was a hundred yards or so from the recently-completed (in 2000) Latter Day Saints Conference Center. Wikipedia says (echoing the Mormon website) the new space is the largest theater-type auditorium ever built, seating some 21,000 people. That's over three times the capacity of the Tabernacle, a space larger than many sporting arenas. And the new space has an organ! I learned of space and organ alike while browsing the recent catalog from the Organ Historical Society.

A little further digging--especially a fascinating article by the primary Tabernacle organist John Longhurst about the design deliberations regarding the organ--reveals the difficulty involved in putting a pipe organ in a space that's much more akin to a stadium than to a church or theater. The initial planning asked questions about what kind of instrument to put in the new space, a conventional pipe organ versus an all-electric organ versus an electric / pipe hybrid or perhaps something altogether different. If we think about the electronic organs used in sport stadiums, we get a sense of the difficulty in getting a pipe organ to sound in so large a space, and to sound, well, like a church or auditorium organ. (John Longhurst's article also addresses the impracticality of specifying a concert organ, since 20,000 people are unlikely ever to come specifically to hear the organ. This is all stuff to be considered.)

After deliberating it was decided to follow the formula that had proved so successful in the smaller space, but adapted to the unique new setting: that is, a large "American Classic" style pipe organ designed to blend at appropriate power with the unassisted Tabernacle Choir, with the whole to be amplified to sound adequately throughout the space (this strikes me, actually, as one of the "hybrid" options, since what most people will hear in the space will be very much influenced by whatever public address system is employed). The necessity for amplification made it unnecessary to scale the instrument up to match the building, with the result that the new organ is about the same size as the Tabernacle organ (still a very sizeable instrument). The concern was more about colors and variety than power. The organ's "American Classic" style would be similar to the Tabernacle's famous Aeolian-Skinner, which makes for stylistic continuity with the Tabernacle. But it poses a challenge for whatever firm is chosen for the task (see Most Famous Organ in America comment above).

(The new upstart.)

(The tried-and-true.)

The Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company closed its doors in 1972 after a decade of steady decline, a victim of changing tastes. By this time the public taste had been in the thrall of the "neo-baroque" organ movement for over a decade. As so often happens in matters of public taste, we have in recent years come to recognize and celebrate some of the merits of these earlier ways of thinking about organ design and tone (and indeed there were those whose enthusiasm had never wavered). But in the early '70s the American Classic organ, the aesthetic embodied by Aeolian-Skinner and M.P. Möller and others, was distinctly out of fashion. By 2000 there weren't many firms with experience designing and building this style of organ (even if we'd begun to restore and protect the remaining American Classic organs).

Pipe organs are traditionally custom designed and built for a specific site, and an instrument like this one--a large, expensive, high-profile instrument in a very public space--would be a plum commission for any organ building firm. And so the search was on. The commission was awarded to the Schoenstein Organ Company of San Francisco for a grand instrument in the American Classic style, a modern rendition, one might say, of Aeolian-Skinner's work 60 years ago in the Tabernacle. Schoenstein has been in business since 1877, and they're a firm I've heard of but whose instruments are unfamiliar to me. But their historical aesthetic seems perfect for this application. From their website:

We are builders of organs in the Romantic-Symphonic style employing electric-pneumatic actions. Many have characterized our work as carrying forward into the 21st century the type of approach pioneered by E.M. Skinner.

(One of the organ's most intriguing features is the installation of a 32' Diaphone stop from an old organ in Los Angeles. A diaphone is a kind of reed pipe that uses a valve rather than a reed to vibrate the air column. This makes for a very strong fundamental tone with little harmonic development. Its function over a standard reed is the production of penetrating power--diaphones are used much more for foghorns nowadays than organ stops! Diaphones were never commonplace in organs and they're quite rare today--and in this installation its inclusion is evidently a step made to accommodate the immense hall into which the instrument speaks.)

Armed with all this new information, I was especially interested to dig into this recording. New installations of massive, high-profile instruments like this one or Lynn Dobson's recent instrument for Philadelphia's Kimmel Center or the now-famous Fisk at Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas are rare and special (and I'm now on a mission to find other recordings of Schoenstein instruments).

So the instrument is most interesting. But I wish we'd had a bit more substantial fare here for demonstration purposes. The disc is mostly of contemporary pieces, almost all short bits that seem suitable for some part of an actual church service (I guess they've given us fair warning: Hymns for the Sabbath). While a couple are a mite intriguing--Vaughan Williams' Prelude on the Welsh hymn tune Rhosymedre, Walford Davies' Solemn Melody, two Bach arrangements--most are a kind of mundane celebration of tonality, straightforwardly tuneful and harmonically unadventurous. Not that there isn't a place for this: these selections might be just what will play in the sanctuary (I imagine the congregation en masse might have little patience for, say, César Franck's Priere, to say nothing of Messiaen's Dieu Parmi Nous). But it's hard for me to generate much enthusiasm for a program seemingly chosen for a congregation's attention span. The organ's rich literature contains so very much more than this, and it would seem trivially easy to assemble a recital of substantial pieces to satisfy the mind as well as demonstrate the instrument. Even the two Bach pieces here are "arrangements," a kind of dumbed-down Wal-Mart version of Bach (the idea of someone "improving" on Bach seems like a very good exemplar of real sacrilege).

I'd look forward to more from this instrument, but as alluded to above there may be little opportunity for concertizing on it. Perhaps it will find a recording life (despite the immense space having almost no acoustic, and the magnificent Tabernacle instrument a stone's throw away).

The Cycle Is Now Complete

Buxtehude and the Schnitger Organ
Hans Davidsson
Loft Recordings, LRCD 1094-1096

***

Well, it took two years, but Loft Recordings has at last released the third and final volume of Hans Davidsson's complete survey of the organ works of Dietrich Buxtehude.

I was quite unbounded in my enthusiasm for the first two releases (here and here), and this three-disc set completes the series.

This release is again recorded on the magnificent GOArt organ at Göteborg University in Sweden. This instrument, which dates from 2000, was specifically constructed as a recreation of the state of the organ-building art for the late 17th Century, an instrument that would seem familiar and contemporary to Buxtehude himself. In addition to the appropriate acoustic--in terms of room size and material composition--the organ was designed and constructed with the limitations and preferences that existed at the time, including the use of quarter-comma meantone (of which a bit more is mentioned in my first review of this cycle, which happens to be of Volume Two). All of the glories and successes of the earlier releases are once again on display here, and this issue becomes a must-have if you've enjoyed the earlier releases.

The titles of the CDs give a subtle and specific focus to each release. The first release--Buxtehude and the Meantone Organ--emphasizes the revelation that awaits us to hear these compositions on a period-correct tuning scheme. This is no small task, as the employment of quarter-comma meantone requires a dedicated keyboard and pipe layout--indeed it fundamentally alters the entire instrument mechanically. But it's a sacrifice that yields an ample payoff, as this series readily demonstrates.

The second release--The Bach Connection--emphasizes the connection between the elder Buxtehude and the young Bach; the pieces give us a glimpse of what spurred Bach to make his famous trek to Lübeck in 1705/6. Buxtehude was the organ superstar of his day, and one can only imagine what Bach's fertile genius must have experienced in Buxtehude's presence (indeed, Bach was granted a two-week leave for the trek, but in the event was AWOL for four months. He returned to Arnstadt to find himself in very hot water indeed).

Now this third and final release shines light on the organ building genius of the time (and arguably one of the great geniuses of all time in this field), the German Arp Schnitger (1648-1719). Organ building reached a universally-acknowledged zenith under Schnitger (a convergence of music and instrument occurred at this time analogous to what was found in Paris two centuries later under Arisitide Cavaillé-Coll), and many of the principles he applied and perfected are still in use today. This GOArt organ is designed less as a direct copy of any specific Schnitger organ than as a faithful demonstration of the validity of his ideas in all facets.

I'm not quite knowledgeable enough about the pieces to know if the actual compositions were chosen for the theme of each CD release, or whether the CD titles are just intended to focus our attention on a different aspect of this convergence of talents and circumstances. But that magical convergence--of advanced and sophisticated musical language, brilliant composer and visionary organ builder--represented a rare nexus in musical history.

Here are three superb CD releases testifying to the fact.

Another Mix of Nationalities

French on the Flentrop
J. Melvin Butler, organ
St. Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, WA; 1965
Loft Records, LRCD-1013

Works by Franck, Tournemire, Messiaen, Clerambault, Daquin, Balbastre and de Grigny.

***

The organ building firm of Flentrop from Zaandam, Holland is one of the organ world's most venerable and important concerns. Founded in 1903 by Hendrik Flentrop, the firm became by mid-century an early specialist in the study and faithful restoration of historic instruments, with a pointed specialty in mechanical action (at a time when few modern builders, at least of large instruments, were employing this mechanism). Holland and Northern Germany had been a hotbed of progressive organ design in the 17th and 18th Centuries, advancement symbiotically reflected in the works of Dieterich Buxtehude and Bach, Georg Böhm and Samuel Scheidt, Johann Pachelbel and many others, and in our own time the Flentrop firm helped lead the way in recognizing the virtues and merits of traditional organ building.

Flentrop popped onto the radar screen in the US after the firm's 1958 installation of an instrument in the Busch-Reisinger Germanic Museum at Harvard University, a commission from Anglo-American organist E. Power Biggs who had caught the period instrument bug during his travels and recordings in Europe.



Widely recorded and featured on radio broadcasts, this instrument was a revelation for organ fans: it was a small instrument and had no orchestral imitation stops, featuring instead traditional indigenous organ sounds. Its design followed the German werkprinzip, a group of principles around which historic organs had been constructed: wind pressures were generally lower than those used in modern times, and pipes were voiced accordingly, often with great care given to how individual ranks blended together. Also, each division of the organ was located in, and its sound focused by, its own discreet case. And of course the instrument featured mechanical action--a physical link between keyboards and the pipe valves; no electricity was involved except to run the blower. And the result was very different from the player's perspective, certainly, but also for the listener: direct and intimate, the sound had a carefully-composed blend and a highly musical intensity that was all its own. It's hard to overstate the role this instrument played in reshaping public tastes in organ sound. Through these early efforts, the organ reestablished its place as an autonomous musical instrument (and not as a one-person "orchestra").

So much for background. The instrument on our current recording hails from the same shop, not quite a decade after the Harvard instrument was built, when the "neo-baroque" revolution was in full swing. The organ in St. Mark's Cathedral in Seattle was installed in 1965, and bears resemblance to the Harvard instrument on several fronts: it is also formed around werkprinzip ideas; it has similarly plain casework; it employs similarly unburnished facade pipes (as opposed to most organs, which have polished tin facades). And while the instrument is larger--as is the acoustic into which it speaks--it is voiced with the same attention and personality as the smaller Harvard instrument displays.

Biggs played the expected classic repertoire on his Flentrop, but he also stressed that the sound fundamental principles used in its design and construction would do justice to any music. And so in addition to recordings of Sweelinck and Gabrieli and lots of Bach, of course, we also got, for example, the organ sonatas of Paul Hindemith. Everything sounded brilliant: clear and lucid, and with a certain very musical intensity.

What I didn't hear from that Flentrop was anything from late-19th & 20th Century France. That organ lacked the appropriate reeds and any kind of swell box, which made for quite a stretch with this repertoire. But I always wondered what, say, a Franck Choral would sound like on that organ; not authentic, surely, but perhaps compelling just the same. The 1965 St. Mark's Flentrop has no such limitations (especially after a careful 1994 rebuild by Paul Fritts). Here we have the resources for anything in the organ repertoire. And it demonstrates, as Biggs predicted, how far a solid foundation can go in making a persuasive case. In addition to having very French-sounding reeds for solo work and in the Pedal, the voicing is clear and bright, and the mechanical action gives a crisp, immediate response.

J. Melvin Butler is a specialist in French repertoire, and gives a fabulous performance. I confess my heart flutters for the Franck and Tournemire and Messiaen here; I'm less able to connect with the French baroque, which is my own limitation. Doubtless the de Grigny and Balbastre and Daquin and Clerambault are as well-treated in Dr. Butler's hands, but I just find it hard to sink my teeth into them.

The recording, as always from Loft, is brilliant and quite silent. St. Mark's is a pretty cavernous space--well-suited to much of this repertoire--and the recording captures the space very well.

State-of-the-Art Fisk

Organ Odyssey
Mary Preston at the Lay Family Concert Organ,
Fisk Op. 100, Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas
Reference Recordings, RR-113
Music of Karg-Elert, Vierne, Mendelssohn, Widor, Ives, Messiaen, Widor, and John la Montaine.

***

This instrument has cropped up on this blog several times before in my reviews or talk of organ construction. A concert hall organ might be expected to represent a firm's ultimate effort, having talents ranging from the power to pummel all within a large space into a pudding of awe to the versatility necessary for playing a very wide range of repertoire; and this Fisk instrument is something of a torch-carrier for the current state of the art; it's the quintessential modern concert hall organ. It's the instrument to which Lynn Dobson's recent organ for Philadelphia's Kimmel Center will most naturally be compared (I'm still waiting for a solo recording of that new instrument.)

I've reviewed several recordings in this space made on Yale University's magnificent Skinner organ in Woolsey Hall; these recordings inevitably cause me to think of this particular Fisk, both because the two instruments are in pursuit of the very same goal, and because each is perhaps the most prominent organ of this type built in its own day. The Woolsey Skinner seems suffused to me with a kind of inner glow, a unified sonic genius that would ensure that Ernest M. Skinner went into the history books not only as an expert builder of first-quality large symphonic pipe organs, but also as someone who left a distinct sonic stamp on organ building in this country and around the world.

It might fairly be said that Charles Fisk's legacy is further-reaching, one that covers a much broader range of tonal and mechanical philosophy than Skinner's. Fisk built in a pretty broad range of styles, and his firm have branched out even further since Fisk's death in 1983; perhaps no single instrument can fairly stand for all that Mr. Fisk's ambitions encompassed.

So with the caveat that even a magnificent organ like the one in Dallas's Meyerson Symphony Center cannot speak for the totality of the firm, this is still an instrument which has gained a real prominence in the musical world. Built in 1991, the organ boasts over 4,500 pipes spread over four manuals and pedal, and ranks as one of the world's most important and ambitious organs built for this kind of setting.

Part of the reason this Fisk instrument comes to mind as I listen to Yale's Skinner is because this Skinner is so very distinctive--and so different sounding than this state-of-the-art Fisk. However immensely impressed I am by this Fisk, I would certainly not confuse it for the Skinner in Woolsey hall, nor would I be able to identify it as a Fisk instrument in a blind test. I can't say with certainty that I could do this for Woolsey's Skinner either, but I think I'd come much closer. I'm not sure if there's anything like a fair litmus test here, but all these things are pieces of a puzzle that I'm trying to assemble in my mind as to what sonic components comprise an organ's style, and what elements make some of these instruments more distinctive than others.

I think one of the things contributing to my inability to identify this organ blind is that this Fisk is attempting to give the organist maximum flexibility for a wide repertoire. We might even say the firm have done a fantastic job of executing other people's tonal preferences. Thus, there is a French-inspired Résonance division and an English-derived Tuba division, and the rest of the organ built to unify those two worlds. I daresay that Ernest M. Skinner seemed more apt to build an instrument that conformed to his own internal compass about what an organ should be--and he made quite a sales pitch about why his tonal ideas were correct--and that repertoire played on it would thus be "Skinnerized." And it was his genius that his ideas seemed sonically unified and viable. This Fisk, by contrast, seems to try and deftly straddle several lines of stylistic demarcation, all unified by skillful voicing and a kind of central guiding hand.

(Oh yeah, and it looks jaw-dropping amazing!)

Mary Preston is the organist of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and she is the Curator of this magnificent organ. She has now recorded several discs on the instrument, covering Duruflé's big works, a Widor Symphony, a couple compositions by Max Reger, and Reubke's Sonata on the 94th Psalm, among others. Now we have a recent Reference Recordings release featuring German and French works, plus a couple American compositions as well. All these recordings show Mrs. Preston as a highly-skilled virtuoso, and also a musician of pretty broad range. She knows her way around this instrument, and demonstrates its many colors most deftly. It does what a concert hall instrument ought to do: great justice to repertoire of different schools and periods.

The opening, majestic chords of Karg-Elert's March on "Nun danket alle Gott" start the recital, and we travel through, among others, a frothy Op. 55 Piéce de fantaisie of Louis Vierne, one of Mendelssohn's Sonatas, and the compelling stridency of Messiaen's Dieu parmi nous as we go (the Messiaen seems most persuasively presented). Ives's Variations on 'America' are a whimsical bit of youthful writing, easily accessible and based on the most familiar of tunes. She finishes the recital with the second most famous of all organ pieces, the final movement Toccata of Widor's Fifth Symphony, all played in exemplary fashion.

One of the things I particularly love about the instrument is the immediacy with which it speaks into what is still a pretty generous acoustic for a modern concert hall (pains were taken in the hall's construction to make it organ-friendly, including having concrete-lined resonance chambers which can be opened and closed according to preference). The organ's casework helps focus the sound such that every pipe is audible. The Fisk has a more developed (or at least a more prominent) upperwork than the Woolsey organ, and there is an engaging, almost shrill aggressiveness to the instrument's tutti which reminds me of some of the great French organs in Paris (though with quite different-sounding reeds).

Alas, I may wring my hands forever on this topic without quite finding the conclusion I seek. But so long as there are instruments like this one to raise the question, I'll be happy to consign myself to the endless trek.

The recording, as "Reference Recording" suggests, is excellent, which is the more impressive given the instrument's huge dynamic range.

Size Matters

This is a post from January of last year from my other blog. It seems it might have a more sensible existence over here.

***

I continue my little musical nostalgia tour from the last post. It's been a musical couple of weeks, which is much better than a couple weeks of politics.



Our hotel in PHL is a block from the old Wanamaker department store, now owned & operated by Macy's. This store contains, in what seems the ultimate non-sequitur, the largest operational pipe organ in the world.




As a devoted fan of the pipe organ, I've known of this instrument for many years. It's not really my kind of organ; this is an ultimate example of what we might call the symphonic organ, that is, the organ as a kind of one-man orchestra. This design philosophy, which really took off after Bach's death and found great flowering in the 19th and 20th Centuries at the hands of France's Aristide Cavaille-Coll and America's Ernest M. Skinner, among many others, stands in philosophical contrast to the organs that Bach knew. Bach's organ was a stand-alone instrument with its own repertoire and its own history having nothing to do with the orchestra or any other instruments. Starting in the late 1950s, by which time these symphonic organs were the established norm, there was a push in the organ world to return to the non-imitative roots of the baroque organ, creating a pretty deep rift--almost a civil war--between the neo-baroque and romantic / symphonic camps. To me this whole fight has been a vital and interesting one (in a sitting- on- the- sidelines- while- buttoned- down- Christians- throw- stones- at- each- other kinda way), one with a few dollops of intrigue thrown in; but that's kind of another post.



The organ at Wanamaker's has the additional distinction of being incongruently located in the eight-story central court of an operating retail department store. As if the pipe organ does not seem anachronistic enough on its own (something about which I'm feeling rather bruised and vulnerable lately), the idea of supporting such a beast with retail shoppers of socks and underwear is positively surreal. Proven so, actually, since nobody I saw shopping during the 45 minute concert paid the least attention to the music. But John Wanamaker had money and a love for the organ and a place to put one, and the rest is history.

Yesterday was the first time I ever heard the Wanamaker instrument. I've walked past the building a few times in the last five years, but the last couple times I've been here the store has been closed for its conversion from a Lord & Taylor to a Macy's. Yesterday everything was up and running as usual. There are regular noontime concerts played every day of the week, and there are afternoon concerts three days a week, plus weekend concerts and occasional special events (including after-hours things where they can let the beast out of its cage properly). So I timed my walk around the city to make the noon concert.

The organ speaks into the large, central shopping court from several levels, and the delivery-van-sized console is visible behind a railing on the third level. Walking around to the console, a flat screen monitor televises the organist at work. I can't entirely fault the shoppers for not paying more attention to the music, as there are no accommodations made for concertgoers--no seats and not many good places to stand and watch & listen--and the repertoire, while pleasant and demonstrative of the huge variety of the lower half of the instrument's dynamic range, was not thought-provoking. Which is as it should be; after all, it is a working retail establishment, and they can hardly do without their phones or normal business transactions for two 45-minute periods every day.



After the concert I talked to the organist and one of the two technical people who look after the instrument full-time, and I got a tour of the massive console. Much of the organ--including this awesome control console--was built by a shop on the 12th floor of the store (space now leased out to other tenants), with the pipes themselves coming from the Kimball Organ Company. The instrument was originally installed in the department store in 1911, at which time its 10,000 pipes (already several times the number found in most church organs today) were deemed "inadequate" for the space and enlargements were undertaken. By about 1930 the organ had tripled in size to its present 28,000 pipes. I talk of the organ exercising the quieter half of its dynamic range, but even then the power of the instrument rather takes one by surprise. Considering that, from where I listened to the concert from the third floor I could not have heard a normal cell phone ringer down on the main shopping floor below me, the fact that even a quiet solo stop is clearly audible throughout the eight-story courtyard gives one an idea of what kind of horsepower is behind it. And naturally, the organ has the resources to make conversation in the courtyard quite impossible. Those who have heard a good-quality pipe organ in their local church or auditorium know that organ bass is often felt as much as it is heard, the product of high energy, low frequency sound waves produced by the large pedal pipes. Well, one can imagine what kind of power is required to shake the air--and the occupants--of so large a space as this one.

It's amazing, really, that Macy's would agree to continue funding something which at this point can only be considered an historical and nostalgic oddity. Surely this instrument no longer generates any real revenue, and yet Macy's pay a staff organist and several assistants, as well as two full-time maintenance people. They also contract out some maintenance services when the jobs get too big for the in-house shop to handle. While there is a non-profit foundation called the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, and the organ has received several substantial endowments and private donations, it is still some burden on Macy's and one cannot help feeling grateful that they have embraced this quirk in the store's past.

It's a little off track, but even as long as I've been a student of this instrument and (some of) its repertoire--nearly 30 years now--I'm still not immune to its magic. I have made treks over the years to a number of individual pipe organs both here and in Europe, instruments which I've come through recordings to love; I've examined and played them in my unskilled way, and gotten a sense of their presence and of the rooms and acoustics where they live; and I've been witness to some awesome demonstrations by people who knew what they were doing at these instruments. And I'm always frankly amazed at the organist's skill.



Yesterday at Wanamaker's I watched the organist at the console during the concert via a little flat screen monitor outside the cordoned-off area where the console sits, and though he appeared to be a thousand years old he still achieved a near-magical feat that virtually none of us could do. The coordination required of an organist--just the aspect of playing coherent musical phrases with one's feet while the hands do their thing simultaneously on two separate keyboards--requires a physical command of one's body that borders on the impossible. (Look sometime at the notation for Bach's Trio Sonatas for organ and you'll have some idea of what this inter-limb / digit coordination entails.)

But there's more. Look at the photos of this console.





In addition to six separate keyboards (basically, one for each division of the organ, each of which will have a distinct function or sonic character) plus a full pedalboard, there is a tablet for activating each of several hundred individual timbres of the organ, controls for coupling divisions together (at various octave intervals), pedals and sliders for controlling the volume of sound allowed to escape from the chambers where the pipes are contained, and a baffling array of buttons and footswitches which can be programmed to singly make large-scale changes of the organ's settings. And a couple dozen other odds and ends to boot. Ignoring the business of simply playing a coherent musical thought in this setting (again, a not inconsiderable task by a long shot), just the management of all these other controls and resources at this console requires a physical dexterity and concentration that I would venture few of us ever have to muster in life. Put the two things together--playing music and managing the machinery--and we have arrived at outright sorcery. This has to rank among the most complicated tasks the human brain and body can tackle. I can think of no better way for a hunched-over old man to inarguably win the pissing contest of masculine achievement than to play something coherent on this instrument. Top THAT, football boy. That the purpose of all this training and skill is to fill an arena-sized room with a kind of bone-marrow-boiling sound makes it all the more interesting. Or, looked at from the opposite angle, that such stirring musical ideas come to fruition by way of such great demands placed on the artist makes the art remarkable.

One Good Turn Deserves Another

Widor: Organ Favorites
Robert Delcamp at the Martin Pasi organ of the St. Cecilia Cathedral, Omaha
Naxos Records, 8.570310
Excerpts from Symphonies 1-6 and 9, etc.

***

I've long wondered what role authenticity really plays in musical enjoyment. I found myself very early on drawn to the sound of period instruments in baroque music, but not, I think, because these sounds were supposed to be "correct." No, I just liked the fundamental sounds better; I liked the clarity and intonation and / or lack of affected vibrato in music of my favored period. Even more contrarily, I always wondered whether more contemporary music wouldn't sound better on these older sounds (we do the converse of this all the time, by playing antique music on modern orchestral instruments, harpsichord music on piano, Buxtehude and Pachelbel and Scheidemann on modern organs). I knew that the music of Cesar Franck, say, played on the Flentrop organ at Harvard University--an organ whose sound I so loved and which was so effective in Bach--would go against custom and even the composer's stated desires; and yet I still felt the music would come off really well in that setting. Different, sure; but moving and wonderful and maybe better in some ways--small and focused and intimate.

Well, I never did get to hear Franck on that particular Flentrop (though E. Power Biggs recorded Hindemith to very good effect on it), but I've heard quite a bit of his music on very different instruments than Franck had in mind; and as with Bach's music Franck has a near-universal appeal that transcends period specifics.

This present release is another opportunity to put some of these questions front and center. The instrument, the Op. 14 of 2003 from the shops of Martin Pasi and Associates, resides in the St. Cecilia Cathedral in Omaha, NE, and is familiar to us from two recently-reviewed discs of baroque music performed by George Ritchie and Julia Brown (another issue from which Buxtehude cycle I have since acquired, recorded on the same instrument). We may recall from those reviews that the organ is really two organs in one, sporting a dual temperament. The whole organ of 55 stops on three manuals and pedal is available in well-tempering, and a smaller portion--29 stops on two manuals and pedal--is available in quarter-comma meantone. This is a really valuable tool for exploring the music of Bach and earlier, as those temperaments were a fact of life before the 19th Century, and music sounds different when tempered.

(Drawknobs for well-tempered; sliding levers for meantone.)

But the organs which Cesar Franck played were not tempered, at least not anything like what Buxtehude knew. So the idea of a non-equally-tempered organ being used for more contemporary music--music made familiar to us via equal tempering--seemed to push my old-sounds-with-new-music idea out nearer the uncharted waters. Once again it's our friends at Naxos who deliver the goods for us. The prevalent well-tempering of the organ (all 55 of the organ's stops are available this way) is subtle enough that it might be mistaken for equal temperament if you weren't paying close attention. None of the keys is woefully off color, and the Widor Symphonies spend much of their time in familiar tonalities. But these pieces meander through a much wider range of tonalities than was common in the Baroque, resulting in an occasional piquancy from the tuning and a glow to some of the resolutions that you don't hear with equal tempering. It's a little unexpected, but just as delightful here as with music where it's more commonly found.

And quite apart from the tuning, this instrument is clearly not from Cavaillé-Coll's workshop. It's a nicely powerful instrument with a solid 32' underpinning in a really wonderful, reverberant space, but it doesn't have a characteristic French sound; the reeds especially lack that brassy snarl that so characterizes C-C's organs. Just the same, I think it sounds fantastic in this literature, even if it might have sounded a bit odd to Franck's ears.

More distracting than the temperament to me is the organ's fairly flexible wind, which makes itself known in some of the big, chordy sections of the Symphony Finales. It's not extreme, and I don't mean to protest (though in fact I do think of it as a defect of antiquity that someone resurrected centuries later in an attempt to be "fashionable" and others followed suit), but it's an affectation that one simply isn't used to hearing in instruments after the Baroque. And a couple times I wonder if I didn't hear the instrument struggling to provide enough wind to meet the organist's demands. (In a couple recordings of Biggs' Flentrop, one could hear some parts of the organ flat slightly at the big climaxes, something which organ builder Fritz Noack told me a couple years ago was due to inadequate winding of the instrument's rückpositiv division--which malady he was hired to remedy. Well, this Pasi organ's temperament might be playing a role here: were the meantone stops added to the mix for big climaxes, for example?) Maybe my ears were just playing tricks on me. The effect, if there was one, was very subtle and nothing to prevent a thorough enjoyment of the performances.

Organist Robert Delcamp hails from Sewanee, Tennessee, where he is Professor of Music, University Organist and Choirmaster, and Chair of the Music Department at The University of the South. He has made several recordings for Naxos, mostly involving the music of Marcel Dupré. This marks Dr. Delcamp as a specialist in French repertoire and makes him a natural for Widor's music (Dupré was Widor's assistant at St. Sulpice in Paris for many years before taking over the position when Widor retired), and his performances are really excellent. He takes his time to let the organ speak into the great space, and he lingers over Widor's writing like someone who is trying to tell a story. I've never heard these pieces better, and rarely as good.

Another Buxtehude Cycle

Buxtehude: Organ Works, Volume 6
Julia Brown, organist
The Martin Pasi organ of St. Cecelia Cathedral, Omaha, NE
Naxos Records (follow link above to see track listing)

***

In looking through Naxos's recent CD releases, I see an ongoing Buxtehude series by organist Julia Brown, at least three volumes of which are recorded on the Martin Pasi organ in Omaha (their Op. 14) which captured my attention in George Ritchie's Bach cycle.

A quick listen on iTunes made for a very happy discovery. Although originally from Brazil, Dr. Brown currently holds the organist's bench at First United Methodist Church in Eugene, Oregon, and she earned her Master's and Doctorate at Northwestern University under the watchful eye of Wolfgang Rübsam. And his influence seems immediately apparent in her playing: she shares his vibrant but flexible sense of time (which always sounds more convincing with Buxtehude than with Bach to my ear), and her registrations and interpretations are confident and outspoken, at times even cocky; her confidence is exhilarating.

The organ is more interesting than I realized. From the Ritchie release, I knew the organ to have a non-equal temperament and mechanical action. But it seems the Pasi firm have gone considerably beyond that. From a bit of digging online, I learned that the instrument actually features two separate, selectable temperaments--making it like two organs in one. From the Pasi website:

The organ is comprised of 55-stops over three manuals and pedal, 29 of which are playable in two temperaments: 1/4-comma meantone and a new well-tempered tuning devised for this instrument by Kristian Wegscheider of Dresden, Germany.

This is the first I'd heard of the idea, but--of course--it seems that the shop of C.B. Fisk tried their hand at the same thing with their Op. 85 at the Memorial Church at Stanford University, Standford, CA. In both cases, extra pipes are included in the selected ranks, and, in the case of the Pasi organ, different stop-activation methods determine which pipes are engaged.

Again, from the Pasi website:

[29 of the organ's stops] ...contain eight extra notes per octave, tipping the scale of the concept from a single organ with extra pipes to the equivalent of two organs which share a third of their pipes. The abundance of extra pipes allows the circulating temperament to accommodate much of the Romantic and modern repertoires, while retaining enough key color to bring Baroque music alive and to lock into tune the mixtures and reeds in the best keys.

All stops in the Oberwerk and selected stops in the Hauptwerk and Pedal divisions are available in both temperaments. The well-tempered and meantone organs share the following notes in every octave: C, D, G and A. The desired temperament may be chosen independently in each division by the choice of stops. Each dual-tempered voice has two sliders and separate stop controls: traditional drawknobs for the well-tempered stops and Italian-style levers for the meantone stops.

I'm interested to know how limited the interaction between the "two organs" must be. Obviously, all 55 stops are available with the milder well-tempering. But presumably things played in meantone temperament are restricted to a much smaller 29 stops. Or can one mix and match? Maybe it depends on the key in which one is playing.

Regardless, the proof, as the saying goes, is in the pudding. The organ sounds wonderfully authentic and entirely of a piece (even if it's really of two pieces!). These performances hold their own with the excellent Hans Davidsson releases on the wonderful GOArt organ in Sweden (and, indeed, with Rübsams own Buxtehude cycle from 20 years ago). Given my enthusiasm for those releases, this is high praise indeed. It goes without saying that Naxos has given us a fantastic sounding disc.

I see that Dr. Brown also has three discs of Scheidemann on a Brombaugh organ in Eugene, OR. I'll sample those shortly.

A Bit of Recent Organ Archeology

Discoveries: Christopher Marks plays the Crouse Holtkamp
The 1950 Walter Holtkamp organ at Crouse College, Syracuse University
Raven Records OAR-790
Music of Bach, Dupré, Sowerby, Franz Tunder, David N. Johnson (1922-1987), Joseph Ahrens (1904-1999) and Nicolas Scherzinger (b. 1968)

***

With my recent review of Murray Forbes Somerville playing Bach on the Flentrop organ at Harvard University, I touched a bit upon the upheaval in the organ world that began in the early-mid 20th Century, as organists and listeners became aware of the merits of the organ of Bach's day. That Flentrop organ was one of the earliest instruments of modern times--certainly one of the most famous--to wholly embrace this organ reform movement. The principles of the movement included, among others:

• Mechanical key and stop action (the only electricity involved was to run the blower, and some of these neo-baroque organs even allowed for a manual winding option); this restricted how the organ could be laid out and how large it could practically be.
  
• The choirs of the organ were discretely organized into physical sections, and the sound of each was focused by its own case.
• Relatively low wind pressures were employed.
• Pipes were voiced differently, using an open toe and controlling pipe speech at the mouth of the pipe.
• Eventually, historic temperaments were regularly incorporated.
  

All of these things were a departure from how the organs of the time were constructed. A modern Aeolian-Skinner organ used considerably higher wind pressures, and the organ was thoroughly electrified. A modern organ console was basically a mass of electric switches, connected to the organ with an umbilical of electric cords, and could be placed anywhere; the organ pipes could be installed in any configuration--wherever the pipes could be made to fit--with the divisions of the organ mixed up together. In this scenario, casework becomes almost entirely cosmetic. (The one exception here would involve sections of the organ which were under expression--that is, inside a swell chamber where the volume escaping from the chamber could be controlled by a foot-pedal-activated wall of venetian shutters; these sections needed to be geographically contiguous.)

With early 20th Century organs designed to be a one-person orchestra (for playing orchestral transcriptions, say, or accompanying a silent film), many of the sounds were imitative of orchestral timbres, and the stoplists for these organs were very different from what Bach had been familiar with. It was against all this that the organ reform movement sought to rebel. The baroque organ had been a stand-alone instrument, one with its own repertoire and not predominantly imitative of anything except other organs. The rediscovery of these European organs reminded listeners that there was another way, and many found that other way to be more coherent and compelling.

This present CD introduces us to an intermediate stage along this retro-modernization movement. The organ, dating from 1950, comes from the Cleveland shops of Walter Holtkamp, and was a significant instrument in several respects. The Holtkamp Company was one of America's foremost organ builders in 1950, and Walter Holtkamp Sr. was one of the reform movement's leading proponents in this country.


This present instrument is significant both for its reform stoplist (combined with some of the previous organ's romantic pipework) and for Holtkamp's soon-to-be trademark use of totally open pipework. A portion of the organ is under expression, which of course requires some kind of containment casework; but most of the organ sits out in the open, the pipes themselves like a beautiful, sparkling sculpture, without any kind of casework above. The organ is installed in an alcove in the building, which might be expected to act like an oversized case, but subsequent Holtkamp organs were often installed completely in the open. Walter Holtkamp believed this made the sound of the organ more intimate and immediate, and it made for really striking and individual looking instruments. While the Crouse instrument has electric action, Holtkamp's son, Walter Holtkamp Jr., introduced mechanical action to the firm, and subsequent instruments have been a mixture of mechanical and electric action as the customers and circumstances demand.

While the instrument is not particularly baroque up next to the 1958 Flentrop (to say nothing of a present-day Fritts or Brombaugh organ), when viewed next to an Aeolian-Skinner of 1950 it's a pretty radical departure. And sonically it's clearly a step back toward this new way of thinking. And it makes for a compelling and very successful organ, one which does Bach with great unity and vibrancy, but also deftly handles more modern fare (which is always the challenge, isn't it? An instrument tailored for Buxtehude will struggle with Franck or Duruflé; compromises must be found).

Christopher Marks is Assistant Professor of organ at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. From 1999-2006 he taught organ and music theory at Syracuse University, where he became intimately familiar with this Holtkamp organ. As such, he has an affection for the instrument and an excellent sense of how to show it in the best possible light. In addition to Bach and Franz Tunder, Marks plays three pieces from Dupré's Suite Bretonne and the Passacaglia of Leo Sowerby, plus some excellent pieces from Joseph Ahrens and from past and present Syracuse faculty Nicolas Scherzinger and David N. Johnson. It's a wonderful recital of known and unknown, on a versatile and significant instrument.



Sonically, the disc is fine, though the acoustic--so typical in American recital halls--is a bit dry.

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.