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Contents:
DDD Total time = 67.30 - Recorded at St. Boniface Episcopal Church, Sarasota, Florida, USA - September 1998 Trois Préludes & Fugues, Op.7 During his final years as a student before the First World War, Dupré was encouraged by Widor, his composition teacher, to enter for the prestigious national composition prize, the Prix de Rome, which he finally won in 1914, after two failed attempts. But the operatic world of the cantata around which the Prix revolved held little attraction for him; immediately after his first attempt in the summer of 1912, Widor suggested that he should spend his holiday composing a new cantata, and Dupré rebelled. He chose instead to ‘refresh his spirits’ by writing some organ music, and the result was the first major work of his maturity, the set of Three Preludes & Fugues, Op.7; when he finally showed them to Widor, he could not help exclaiming ‘Ah, mon cher Maître, I wrote them in the hope that you would free me, free me from the Prix de Rome!’ Revolutionary in both conception and technique, these pieces were hardly a commercial proposition at that time - indeed, Dupré himself was probably the only organist in France with the technique to play them - and they were to remain in manuscript for eight years, until Alphonse Leduc finally agreed to publish them in 1920, when the composer’s name had become better known. In due course the Preludes and Fugues became standard repertoire works, but it is difficult to overestimate their originality in those early days before the First World War, when some pronounced them ‘unplayable’. Dupré’s unparalleled liberty of technique allowed him to express his personal vision with complete integrity, and to maintain throughout each piece an individual and vividly imagined colour and character. A door was opened on the future... Conceived, in the composer’s words, ‘for a triumphal solemnity, like Easter’, the first Prelude and Fugue explodes into life with a joyful carillon of jangling fourths with a striding pedal theme beneath. In the quieter central section the theme becomes a little more lyrical in character, before a crescendo of antiphonal exchanges between manual and pedal (still based on fourths) ushers in the reprise of the opening, with the theme now in canon between the outer parts. The coda returns to the antiphonal exchanges, and a brief pedal solo brings the Prelude to close. The vibrant mood of the Prelude carries through into the Fugue, whose lively subject takes the pervasive fourths and builds them into broken chord figures. Although the fugal writing is fairly free, one can clearly recognise the four voice exposition, and two episodes, the first based on the leaping octaves of the counter-subject, and the second based - for the first time in the whole piece - on a triad, derived from the third phrase of the subject. This second episode involves a good deal of intricate pedal work and some snappy syncopations, which propel the Fugue to its climax, with a stretto between the subject in the soprano and its augmentation in the bass. Then the roles are reversed, and the whole work ends in the most emphatic style with the return of the toccata figuration and the antiphonal manual/pedal dialogue from the Prelude. The second Prelude and Fugue is perhaps the most eloquent of all Dupré’s early works A filigree of staccato semiquavers threads its way throughout the Prelude, accompanying the expressive melodic lines of the other parts, which are entrusted to 8ft flute combinations of varying intensity, ranging from a single voice to a rich four-part texture with double pedal. From the three-note melodic cell of the prelude Dupré fashions a fugue subject whose perfectly balanced rise and fall is a model of expressive elegance. The registration is restricted to 8ft fonds and Voix Celeste, and the music flows so naturally that one is hardly aware of listening to a fugue at all; towards the end there are some neat contrapuntal devices in the form of inversions and stretti, but they seem to float past in a dream, and the atmosphere of melancholy nostalgia is never disturbed. The third Prelude and Fugue is technically the most innovative of the three; the lightness and dexterity of its semiquaver figuration look forward to the developments of the 1920s, when Dupré discovered the possibilities of electric action, and the textures produced by its four-part pedal chords puzzled many professionals in the audience when he gave the first public performance in Paris in 1917. The prelude, which never rises much above a whisper, opens ppp (a novel effect in itself) with scurrying patterns of semiquavers on the manuals, against which a long melodic line stands out in relief. The solo tune moves up to the treble register, and is then generously harmonised by right hand and pedals while the left hand continues the scurrying. In the first two Preludes and Fugues, both movements are conceived as a single entity in terms of mood and registration, but here their character is quite different, and the lively jig-like fugue makes a wonderful contrast to the gentle colours of the prelude. Unity between the movements is established by the return of the melody from the prelude, which gradually infiltrates the contrapuntal texture and dominates the vibrant final page, where the full power of the organ is deployed to thrilling effect. Inventions, Op.50, Book 1In 1954 Dupré gave up the Organ Class at the Paris Conservatoire after 28 years, and agreed to take on the position of Director for a term of two years, until he reached official retirement age in 1956. These two years were not happy ones (‘a preview of Purgatory’), and the thankless and time-consuming administrative work left little time for his own playing and composition; the only work that he was able to complete during this period was the 24 Inventions. Dupré once wrote that ‘nothing is worthwhile that is not achieved within the context of a strict intellectual discipline, freely embraced’; all his work illustrates this proposition to a greater or lesser degree, and none more clearly than this fascinating collection of miniatures in which craftsmanship and poetry combine in perfect harmony. Mostly restricted to two short pages, and to three or four voices, the pieces are all fingered and pedalled, emphasising their practical value for the student, but many of them are by no means unduly difficult, and the emphasis is far more on the compositional side, as Dupré displays unerring resource and imagination in the art of motivic contrapuntal development - ‘invention’ in the way that Bach understood it. There is one piece in every major and minor key, and each has its own unique mood, texture, theme and registration, often using single stops - there are only two loud pieces in the whole set. The title Inventions inevitably recalls the Inventions and Sinfonias of Bach himself, and Bach’s Title Page for those works is also perfectly applicable to Dupré: ‘Upright instruction, wherein the lovers of the clavier, and especially those desirous of learning, are shown a clear way...to learn to play clearly in two....and three obbligato parts; furthermore, at the same time not alone to have good inventiones (ideas), but to develop the same well, and above all to arrive at a cantabile style in playing and at the same time to acquire a strong foretaste of composition.’ The First Book of Inventions begins with a prelude of C major arpeggios in a trio texture, conventional in conception if not in its curiously wistful effect, and contains five more trios of vividly contrasted character - playful crushed notes in No.3, sinuous chromatic lines in No.4, vigorous neoclassical counterpoint in No.6, a haunting six-note ostinato in No.8 and lively semiquaver dialogue in No.10. Flowing four-part textures are introduced in Nos. 5 and 9, and in the strangely elusive meditation of No.7, while denser sonorities are reserved for the elegiac chorale of No.2 and the drifting melodic lines of No.11, which circle and entwine like exotic foliage in a magical dream. The impish final scherzo is one of just two non-linear pieces in the whole collection - a nimble study in staccato and repeated notes. Quatre Fugues Modales, Op. 63These short contrapuntal works from the composer’s old age follow on from the Inventions in their wholesale embrace of a rigorous intellectual discipline; they were written in 1968, when Dupré was 82. The modes he uses are the modes of Ancient Greece, rather than the more familiar church modes; according to this system, which Jehan Alain had also used forty years earlier in his Deux Chorals, the Dorian Mode begins on E, the Phrygian on D, the Locrian on G, and the Ionian on F. Dupré provided a detailed preface for the work, in which he explained the severe limitations that he had imposed for the composition of these pieces: ‘Modal Fugue (an abbreviated title for ‘Fugue on a modal subject’): the subject must include all the degrees of the mode that has been chosen, in order to avoid any ambiguity. It must start and end on the modal tonic, either superior or inferior. Consequently no initial or final mutation is possible. The relative keys are the modal relatives. The form remains the same as the classical fugue. The subject being composed solely of natural notes, only two accidentals are possible, F sharp and B flat.’ One might think that these suffocating restrictions would be sufficient to preclude any possibility of genuine musical expression, but Dupré had always thrived under such conditions, and there is a genuine serenity and nobility in this music, the elegant modal counterpoint unfolding with seemingly effortless, natural ease. Triptyque, Op. 51 In 1957 Dupré’s childhood friend, the conductor Paul Paray, persuaded him to make a short trip to America to inaugurate the new organ of the Ford Auditorium in Detroit. The solo recital was followed a few days later by a performance and recording of Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony, and this recording, in Mercury Living Presence stereo sound, caused a sensation in those early days of stereo LP. The 71 year old composer wrote a new piece for his inaugural recital; this was the Triptyque, Op. 51, and it was to be the last of his virtuoso concert works. In addition to the symphony, Dupré was contracted to make some solo recordings on the new organ, but the engineers decided that the acoustic of the hall in Detroit was too unflattering to make this project worthwhile, and the solo recordings were transferred to New York. The programmes of these two LPs included the new Triptyque, and Dupré’s masterly performance of this work is now a valuable historical document. The opening Chaconne is designed as piece of display not only for the player, but even more for the instrument, calling on a kaleidoscopic array of ever-changing registrations. The ground bass theme is exposed on the pedals at the start; it is only four bars long, and this gives the whole movement the character of a highly-coloured, sectional mosaic, each short variation having its own tempo, texture and registration. After exploring a wide range of softer sounds, the Chaconne quickly builds to a climax with the theme thundering out in pedal octaves beneath a cascade of pianistic manual figuration, but the tumult subsides in an instant, and the movement ends in a hushed pianissimo coda, with parallel chords producing some bizarre, hollow harmonics. The Musette, of fearsome technical difficulty, is a delicate study in repeated notes for the pedals, their incessant patter on a 4ft flute barely pausing for breath as it accompanies the naïve melody of the manual parts. The concluding Dithyrambe bursts in with some dramatic rhetorical exclamations in the form of chords and toccata figuration, and then calms down for a more relaxed second theme. With the entry of more regular semiquaver movement, the pedals are taxed once again with demanding writing in thirds and sixths as the movement builds to its finale in a powerful 6/8 metre, with the second theme triumphantly declaimed over driving pedal octaves, ending in a typical Dupré cadence of four emphatic but unpredictable chords. Page revised Friday May 25 2007 |
