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Contents:
DDD Total Time = 72:23 - Recorded at St. Boniface Episcopal Church, Sarasota, Florida, USA - September 1998, Plainchant tracks recorded at Charterhouse Chapel, Surrey - March 1999 Seventy Nine Chorales, Op. 28 ‘This book contains 79 easy Chorales for organ written on the melodies of the 79 old Chorales which Bach used in his Chorale Preludes. It is needless to say my scheme has not been to give another version of the Bach Chorales. The object of the present book is merely educational. It has been conceived with a view to making the student familiar with the magnificent melodies of the Chorales, in the earlier stages of his work, and to prepare him the better for the study of the Bach Chorales, which are too difficult for beginners. This is not a book of pieces to be performed by the recitalist, as their very brevity indicates. Scarcely would a few of them fill up a short interval in a religious service.......The student who practises slowly and methodically the Chorales contained in this book and strictly adheres to the principles of work laid down here, will be ready to take up the study of the Bach Chorales. Their texture will no doubt appear far richer to him and their polyphony much more complex, but he will realize at once that the new task which awaits him will be like raising a building upon solid foundations.’ In contrast to the complexity and virtuosity of much of the music in earlier volumes, the final instalment of Jeremy Filsell’s Dupré series completes the picture with a single, encyclopaedic work of disarming simplicity. If the early days of Dupré’s career (the complete Bach series, the international tours) were devoted to the establishment of his own reputation as a performing artist, the emphasis undoubtedly changed when he took on the Organ Class at the Paris Conservatoire in 1926, at the age of 40. For the next twenty years or more he devoted an enormous amount of time, thought and energy to his teaching, and the result was a constant stream of textbooks, of complete editions of Bach and other masters (all annotated and fingered for the student in minute detail), and a variety of ‘educational’ music, ranging from the transcendental Suite and Esquisses to the 79 Chorales for beginners. The purpose of this collection is fully explained in Dupré’s own preface, quoted above. The Chorales were originally written for one of his friends, a businessman who loved Bach’s music, and who owned a house-organ with a pianola-style player attachment; in due course he decided that he would like to learn to play some Bach Chorale Preludes himself, but found them technically too advanced. Dupré therefore conceived the idea of these intermediate pieces; his wife later recalled that he composed most of them on the beach at Biarritz during a three-week holiday in 1931. The 79 pieces are mostly designed to take up just a single printed page, concision being achieved if necessary by the omission of repeated sections of the melody (a procedure which admittedly distorts the phrase-structure of a substantial proportion of the chorales). The majority of the settings (49) are written in a four-voice texture, while 24 (not necessarily the easiest!) are trios, four are five-voice settings (including one with double pedal), and two employ full chords. The chorale melody is usually in the soprano voice (44 pieces, including two ornamented settings in the style of Bach’s coloratura preludes), but it sometimes appears in the tenor register (played by the left hand on a separate manual or by the pedal at 8ft pitch), and sometimes in the bass, played by the pedals, and on one occasion it is concealed in the alto part. There are also ten canonic settings (Dupré could never resist a canon...), and two chorale fugues, where each line of the tune initiates a brief fugato. The simplest of these pieces are little more than chorale harmonisations, but in many cases the accompanying contrapuntal voices are more fully developed, sometimes approaching the motivic concentration of Bach’s Orgelbüchlein preludes. In some other settings, one of the accompanying voices is given particular prominence - a flowing triplet obligato for the left hand, perhaps, or an active pedal line. There are also occasional instances of word-painting in the accompanimental figures, again following the example of the Orgelbüchlein. The harmonic language normally remains (more-or-less) within the confines of the style of Bach, but there are also excursions into a more personal and contemporary chromatic style, and even a brief flash of bitonality. While it is invidious (and probably confusing) to pick out individual pieces, it is worth pointing out that the Christmas chorales seem to have inspired from Dupré (as they did from Bach) a particularly vivid response: the exquisite setting of In Dulci Jubilo is undoubtedly the gem of the collection. But many of these tiny miniatures are extremely beautiful, and they all repay attentive listening. In the remarks quoted above, Dupré insisted that none of the 79 Chorales were suitable for public performance, but he appears to have changed his mind; in 1934 he recorded three of them (under the title of ‘Three Chorale Preludes’) on his own house-organ, and when giving complete concerts of his own music, he would sometimes include a few of these pieces as a contrast to the larger, more flamboyant works. However, it must be said that - intended for the typical two-manual organ that a student might have at his disposal - the registrations that Dupré specifies for the 79 pieces are fairly monochrome; in the interests of variety, Jeremy Filsell exploits a fuller range of colour in this performance. According to Abbé Delestre, Dupré ‘refused to accept these Chorales as real composition, considering that all he had done here was to write harmonisations in pastiche forms’, but this seems a perversely harsh judgement. Despite their modest scale, the 79 Chorales embrace an amazing range of style, texture and sensibility, and without them the picture of Dupré’s creative personality would not be complete. In their extreme simplicity we come face to face with the craftsman/poet, exposing here the bare bones of his art, and secure in the belief that ‘nothing is worthwhile that is not achieved within the context of a strict intellectual discipline, freely embraced.’ Page revised Friday May 25 2007 |
