It is worth recording, dammit!
Gramophone, which is possibly the world's best classical music monthly, reviewed in this month's issue a disc from
Hyperion called "
Organ Fireworks X" (meaning volume 10) which my brother bought me for my birthday.
I love the disc, but Gramophone says that apart from a superb rendition of Liszt's
Ad nos, most of the repertoire wasn't worth recording, and that soloist
Christopher Herrick's registration (choice of stops to make a particular sound) relies far too much on horizontal reeds.
(An organ contains 'flues' - pipes which make their sound like recorders do, by the air striking a 'lip' and then reverberating in a tube of a certain length - and 'reeds' - pipes which make their sound like oboes or saxophones do, by the air passing through a metal reed which oscillates, again causing reverberation in a tube of a certain length. All pipes are usually mounted vertically, but horizontal reeds are unusually loud and 'snappy' and have a very powerful sound because they are pointed directly
towards the listener.)
I'll come to Gramophone's criticism later. Let's get to the disc.
It is recorded on the new French-Canadian-built
Létourneau organ in the Winspear Centre in Edmonton, Canada. (You can
hear the instrument online (Realplayer - thanks to MPR's 'Pipedreams'), played by the same soloist, Christopher Herrick, in the inaugural recital he gave around the time he recorded the CD there.)
To start with, the instrument (all 6,551 pipes of it) sounds glorious. I've played a *much* smaller instrument by the same builder, and, in a way, that gave me a firsthand ability to foresee the quality of pretty much anything they would build in the future, and hearing this instrument I'm not disappointed. The hall is large and its auditorium, which was designed by the same people who did Symphony Hall in Birmingham, UK, has an acoustic which is clean and focused, but warm and just reverberant enough to give music room to breathe and mature. But this must all take a close second place to the musicality of the soloist. And on this disc, it does.
Herrick's programme is varied as usual, and on this disc he concentrates mainly on flashy toccatas and jazz-inspired works before finishing with an emotionally perfect rendition of Liszt's towering
Fantasia and fugue on a theme by Meyerbeer, "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam".
Dealing with this first, it is a work which is not often recorded because it's technically difficult to play and takes a lot of physical and emotional stamina, as well as an instrument which can do it justice. Herrick phrases the music carefully, and his choice of sounds fits the emotional content like a glove at all times: the light, glittering statements of the theme in the first section, the celestial whispering of the quietest, most beautiful flutes in the middle and the godlike, thunderous statement of the chorale in the triumphant and shattering final bars. Every note's placement is carefully chosen, even down to the precise articulation of every last pedal crotchet. At all times the different timbres and layers of sound so characteristic of Liszt are clearly distinguished and, as in every other track on the disc, the musicality of the soloist and the care of Hyperion's sound engineers shine through.
It's a disc worth buying for that piece alone, as Gramophone said. But the other repertoire - not worth recording? Yes, most of it has been recorded before, but Mons Leidvin Takle's
Blues-Toccata certainly deserves a place on disc. Herrick's interpretation makes me smile, his rhythmic swinging chords jumping jazzily around like saxophonist gazelle, his choice of the (otherwise blistering) 32' pedal reed alone to underpin a quieter passage with a surprisingly gentle rasping staccatissimo utterly convincing.
David Johnson's
Trumpet Tune in G comes from a stable of similar pieces by this composer, and a Gramophone review of one of its companions previously recorded by Herrick described that rendition as "harmless". Certainly this one is too, but not unentertaining - and in the middle section the trumpet is given a rest while some flutes and a *beautiful* French cornet take up the theme's development. Indeed, while capable of musical universality, I think the instrument even imparts a quintessentially Canadian-Gallic
frisson to the above-mentioned Liszt - and it works too.
Duruflé's dark, sinister
Toccata from
Suite (Op. 5), which I'm listening to now, is edgy and nervous in Herrick's hands. Not a horizontal trumpet in sight, he employs a registration which has a shine, but one of threatening gunmetal rather than the brightest silver. His phrasing stabs at the air. Apparently the composer used to refuse to play or record this in later life, as if it awoke painful memories. A flashy toccata it might be, but so inwardly brooding that it makes you think of the desperate faked smile of the person who's really in the grip of a dark night of the soul.
Joseph Bonnet's
Matin Provençal from
Poèmes d'Automne (Op. 3) opens with a tinkling registration (melliflous flutes in semiquaver arpeggios hovering in the middle of a gentle carillon of bells) which immediately makes you think of sparkling water struck by dappled sunlight. Slowly the camera rises through the trees: the sunlight brightens as the orb emerges over the horizon, and finally we see the treetops stretching far out into the landscape as the introductory arpeggios clang out in fortissimo to celebrate the wonder of a new dawn. Herrick is deply in the veins of this music as in most other performances he's ever given, and the piece might equally be a poem about the blossoming of love, such is the feeling of ecstasy you get at the end - certainly not just an excuse to trot out the organ's bells, as Gramophone implies.
So in short - ignore Gramophone and
buy this disc for
everything on it! Five stars out of four. Well done, Chris. :o)
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