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Contents:
DDD Total Time = 79:40 Recorded: Liebfrauenmünster, Ingolstadt 10 – 13
August 1998 Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937): Symphony pour Orgue et Grand Orchestre (Op.42) At the age of 11 Widor was appointed organist at the Lycée in his home city of Lyon where his playing attracted the attention of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, one of the most influential organ builders in the history of the instrument. Cavaillé-Coll persuaded Widor’s parents to send their son to Brussels to have lessons from the great Belgian organist Jacques-Nicolas. From then on Cavaillé-Coll took an almost paternal interest in his young protégé and when, in 1870, the position of organist at the Parisian church of St. Sulpice became vacant, he sought the support of both Saint-Saëns and Gounod to persuade the church council to appoint the 26-year-old Widor to the post. Widor remained there for an amazing 64 years becoming one of the most important and influential figures in the city’s musical life and a key figure in turn-of-the-century French music. Among other things he used his social connections with wealthy Parisians to set up a fund to support musicians disabled by the First World War and built a large property in Spain for use by French musicians keen to discover more about Spanish music. (The property was destroyed during the Spanish civil war and never rebuilt.) Widor is now remembered almost exclusively for his compositions for solo organ. Cavaillé-Coll had made some revolutionary changes to organ construction and design which he had incorporated into the St. Sulpice organ, built only seven years before Widor’s appointment there. As Widor wrote "to the new instrument, a new language" and he devised a new kind of organ solo work, the "Organ Symphony". He wrote 10 Organ Symphonies containing various contrasting movements each providing an opportunity to display the different colours and tonal effects of Cavaillé-Coll’s "symphonic" organ. But he also composed several operas, much chamber music and substantial amount of orchestral music including three Symphonies, the third of which has an important part for the organ, and two original works for organ and orchestra (Sinfonia sacra and Symphonie antique). In 1882 he was commissioned by the Philharmonic Society to compose an Organ Concerto to mark the 10th anniversary of the magnificent Henry Willis organ in London’s Royal Albert Hall. The commission had been made on the recommendation of the then Prince of Wales – later to become King Edward VII – who had met Widor in Paris the previous year. Instead of a new work Widor chose to arrange three movements from his solo organ Symphonies to create the Symphony in G minor for organ and orchestra (Op.42); the outer movements drawn from the sixth Symphony (Op.42 no.2), on which he was working at the time, and the central andante from the second (Op.13 no.2) composed 10 years’ earlier. The first performance took place in London in August 1882 in the presence of the Prince of Wales and other members of the royal family. For the Symphony’s next performance, which took place in Antwerp in 1905, Widor added the dedication on the manuscript to Charles-Marie Courboin (organist for the Antwerp performance), who played the work again at his inaugural concert as Organist to the Wanamaker auditoriums in the USA. For that performance, given before an audience of over 10,000 on 27th March 1919, he was accompanied by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski (who, coincidentally, was born the same year as Widor gave the première of the work in London). Joseph Jongen (1873-1953): Born in Liège Joseph Jongen became one of the key figures in Belgian music during the first half of the 20th-century. After living in England for the duration of the First World War, he returned to Belgium to take up the post of Professor of Counterpoint at the Brussels Conservatoire, was elected to the prestigious Belgian Royal Academy and from 1925 until his retirement in 1939 was Director of the Brussels Conservatoire. All this followed remarkable early musical progress: admitted to the Liège Conservatoire at the age of seven he left having gained the highest ever marks for his piano and organ playing as well as for composition. At the age of 20 he won a composition competition organized by the Belgian Royal Academy which enabled him to study abroad, first in Germany and later in Italy where he quickly established a reputation as a thoroughly workmanlike, often imaginative composer. In all he had 241 works published not just in Belgium, but in Germany, England and France as well. Jongen was very much a traditionalist at heart and as such was unable or unwilling to follow the musical trends being set by his foreign contemporaries. Towards the end of his life, unable to comprehend the rapid developments taking place in contemporary music, he realised that his was too isolated a voice and he destroyed all but 137 of his works. Of the surviving works his 16, mostly short, pieces for organ are considered an important contribution to the instrument’s repertoire, but the bulk of his music comprises a substantial body of chamber music, choral pieces, songs and a large number of orchestral works including concertante works for violin, viola, cello, harp, piano and organ. He wrote three works for organ and orchestra of which by far and away the best known is the Symphonie Concertante. The others, featured on this disc, are shorter, occasional pieces. The Alleluia was composed in 1940 for the inauguration of the new organ in the concert hall of Belgian Radio while the Hymne for organ and string orchestra dates from 1924. Horatio Parker (1863-1919): History has not been kind to Horatio Parker. He has described as "imposing an irrelevant second-hand Germanic romanticism on the patriots of New England" and most reference books mention him principally as the professor for whom Charles Ives had undisguised contempt: "Parker was a composer and widely known, and [my] father was not a composer and little known – but from every standpoint I should say that father was the greater man." Of his substantial body of music, little is ever heard today. He wrote two operas (his first, Mona, won a $10,000 prize awarded by the Metropolitan Opera of New York) and a large number of choral works, often based on medieval or religious subjects. He was also an important figure in American church music editing the Episcopal Hymnal of 1916 for which he composed 18 new hymn-tunes (of which only one remains in the current edition) and writing a number of organ pieces for liturgical use. The organ was his chief performing interest. At the age of 14 he started organ lessons from his mother and within three years had been appointed to his first church organist’s post - in Dedham, Massachusetts. In 1882 he went to Germany where he studied organ and theory with Josef Rheinberger at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich. Rheinberger encouraged him to take up composition and was sufficiently impressed with Parker’s organ playing skills to invite him to give the première of his first Organ Concerto – which was, in its orchestration for brass, strings and timpani (no woodwind) to prove the model for Parker’s own Organ Concerto. After three years in Germany Parker returned to the USA and settled in New York where he was appointed organist of St Andrew’s Church and taught first at the Cathedral School and later at the National Conservatory of Music. In 1893, shortly after the première of what is generally regarded as his greatest work, the oratorio Hora novissima, and the arrival of Dvorák as Director of the National Conservatory, Parker moved back to his home state of Massachusetts. He took up the post of Organist at Trinity Church, Boston, and the following year was appointed Professor of Music Theory at Yale University where he effectively oversaw the creation and development of the music department. In 1902, Parker was at the very height of his fame. He resigned from his post at Trinity Church in order to take up an organist’s post in New York and in the same year travelled to England to receive an honorary Doctorate in Music from Cambridge University. It was while he was in England that he completed his one and only work for organ and orchestra, the Concerto in E flat minor, which he had started two years’ previously. The première was given in Boston on 26th December 1902 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Gericke. The critics were unenthusiastic. A week later Parker performed it again, this time in Chicago with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Theodore Thomas, but again the critics, whilst admiring Parker’s organ playing, found little to admire about the Concerto, although the Chicago Evening Post described it as "an imposing and brilliant composition". Even a performance in Pittsburgh where the soloist was the famous virtuoso Edwin H. Lemare failed to impress America’s musical establishment. Perhaps Parker’s visit to one of England’s most revered institutions accounts for the Concerto’s somewhat Elgarian first movement, but otherwise the work reveals a strikingly diverse range of influences; the German romantics hover over the beautiful second movement whilst the delicately pattering third is clearly from the same stable as the scherzos of Louis Vierne. The finale, beginning and ending in a gloriously Wagnerian vein, includes an energetic Fugue and a stirring pedal cadenza. © Marc Rochester 1999 Page revised 30.06.03 |
