GMCD 7220 You can order this CD in our E-Shop under Choral Music/The Vasari Singers Reviews ***Sound Clips***	Marcel Dupré Choral Works The Vasari Singers Conducted by Jeremy Backhouse Jeremy Filsell - Organ  www.jeremyfilsell.com Soloists Helen Neeves Soprano (5, 10, 14 & 17) Matthew Beale Tenor (10, 12 & 17) Colin Campbell Bass (5, 10, 14 & 17) Ian Curror Second Organ (3 & 4)

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DDD Total Time = 79:33 / Recorded: Douai Abbey, Upper Woolhampton, Nr. Reading, Berkshire 9-11 February 2001

I do not think of myself as a composer…I have specialised in the organ, and I do not have the reputation that composers have. Marcel Dupré made this admission in 1942, at the height of his career, and one cannot but wonder if it may have been tinged with regret. The teachers who guided him in his formative years were sure that his technical equipment and creative gifts would qualify him to become either a ‘real’ composer, or a concert pianist, or both.

Born in Rouen in 1886, Dupré grew up as the only child in an extended household which Emmanuel Bondeville described as ‘a veritable temple of music’. Four of the five adult residents were musicians and music-teachers: Marcel’s father was an organist (later to become titulaire of one of the finest instruments in France, at Saint-Ouen, Rouen), and his mother was a cellist, who had been taught by a friend of Mendelssohn; his aunt gave singing lessons, and his grandfather was a retired opera-singer (Marcel was named after one of his favourite roles, in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots). The garden behind the house gradually disappeared beneath a music-room of ever-increasing dimensions: in its final form (large enough to accommodate the 100 singers of the choral society which Dupré père founded in 1897) it was inaugurated on Dupré’s 15^th birthday with a performance of a 30-minute cantata which he had composed for the occasion. He acted as accompanist to the chorus (‘L’Accord Parfait’) for several years, and so became familiar, in his own home, with three centuries of choral music, from Bach to Fauré and Debussy, as well as a wide range of chamber music and song. As a piano student at the Paris Conservatoire, Dupré learnt all the standard piano repertoire (much of it from memory), and won his premier prix in 1905 at the age of 19. His composition studies in the class of Widor were rewarded with an outstanding premier prix in Fugue in 1909, and then by the highest accolade of all, the Premier Grand Prix de Rome. In 1913 his cantata Faust et Helène was overshadowed by the wonderful setting of the same libretto by 19-year-old Lili Boulanger, who so tragically died in 1918. But Duprés finally won the prize in July 1914, a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War.

To Dupré these achievements were almost incidental. He was only a few days old when his father’s teacher Alexandre Guilmant inspected the cradle and pronounced, ‘He will be an organist’, and to be an organist was his dream. The organ installed in the family music-room in 1896 became an object of obsessive fascination to le petit prodige (as the organ-builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll used to call him). When he was 11 Dupré was appointed organist of Saint-Vivien in Rouen, and within ten years he had won his premier prix at the Conservatoire, and was acting as Widor’s Assistant at Saint-Sulpice in Paris. After the War he rapidly established his reputation as a concert organist, following his performance from memory of the complete organ works of Bach. International success came first in England, and then in America, where he spent much of the early 1920s. In 1926 he was appointed Professor of Organ at the Paris Conservatoire, where he remained for 30 years (including two as Director), training all the leading French organists of two generations. In 1934 Widor retired from Saint-Sulpice at the age of 89, and Dupré at last became titulaire in his own right - a post which he held until the day of his death on Whit Sunday 1971.

When he was in his late thirties, Dupré abandoned all other forms of composition in favour of the organ: Rattacher l’orgue à la musique, he once said, toute ma vie est là (‘to bring the organ back into the mainstream of music, that is my life’s work…’). His early catalogue includes songs, piano, chamber and choral music, but after the piano Variations of 1924, every work contains the organ – predominantly solo pieces, but also works for organ and orchestra, organ and piano, organ and solo string instruments, chorus and organ.

The earliest works in this recording are the four colourful Motets, Op.9. Published in 1917, they display a wide-ranging diversity of styles, and the opus number may indicate that their composition extended over several years. The ardent lyricism of the vocal lines in O Salutaris is very much in the Gounod/Massenet tradition, while Tantum ergo is a more sober liturgical setting, with chordal writing for the choir in dialogue with an enigmatic organ accompaniment. This is followed by a sombre, dark-hued Ave Maria for soprano voices, and a final ebullient outburst of praise in Laudate Dominum, where the organ plays an important solo role. The three later motets are written in a uniformly restrained liturgical style – a tender Ave Verum from 1936, and two prayers to the Virgin Mary written for the Association of St Cecilia in Rome in 1958; Dupré had been granted two audiences with the Pope during the 1950s, and received a doctorate, honoris causa from the Pontifical Gregorian Institute in 1953.

Dupré’s major choral works were both written in response to the ravages inflicted on the people of France by two World Wars. Declared unfit for military service in 1914 (as a result of childhood surgery on the collarbone), he worked in a military hospital for two years; after being relieved of his duties in 1916 he took refuge in composition, and the next year he had completed De Profundis, a large-scale setting of Psalm 130 dedicated to les soldats morts pour la patrie. By a strange coincidence this work is more-or-less contemporary with Lili Boulanger’s extraordinary setting (in French) of the same psalm, which has received several performances and recordings in recent years. Du fond de l’Abîme is conceived as a continuous symphonic poem, but Dupré’s personal vision of De Profundis led to nine separate, individually characterised movements - one for each of the eight verses of the psalm, with the addition of the traditional responsory from the Requiem Mass, Requiem aeternam. The work is scored for soloists, chorus, orchestra and organ, but its rare performances have more often been given with the composer’s authorised accompaniment for organ solo, and in this form it remained one of his favourites among his own works; he heard it at his 85^th birthday concert in Saint-Sulpice, and excerpts were also sung at his funeral a few weeks later.

There is again a wide diversity of styles between the movements of De Profundis, but repeated listening reveals an inner coherence, culminating quite naturally in the final revelatory evocation of the Heavenly Jerusalem, where ‘there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.’ The first verse is a kind of stylised funeral march, with fragmented appeals from the choir above an insistent rhythmic ostinato. The second verse moves into a new harmonic world in an ecstatic solo trio, while the third is a forceful allegro, with bare canonic writing for the chorus above an obsessive accompaniment of sinister fanfares. After a soaring tenor solo, the fifth verse leaps back through the centuries in a chaste a capella modal fugue, which later increases in intensity with the entry of the organ. Verse 6 is a rapt, impressionistic duet for soprano and bass, and the mood of serene confidence is reinforced by the chorus that follows, with spacious melodic lines flowing around an accompaniment of murmuring semiquavers. The eighth verse returns to the more extrovert military style, with block chords hurled between chorus and organ. The last movement begins with a reprise of the opening funeral march, but this soon melts away, and an ethereal carillon introduces the final radiant vision of the City of Eternal Light.

Thirty years after De Profundis, the devastation of Rouen in the Second World War inspired Dupré to write another large-scale choral work: the result was the oratorio La France au Calvaire, which was finally completed in time for the joint celebration of the restoration of Rouen Cathedral and the 500^th anniversary of the official pardon of Joan of Arc, in 1956. The curious libretto (written by another native of Rouen, the poet René Herval) begins with a Prologue, in which the allegorical figure of La France kneels at the foot of the Cross, and begs the dying Christ to forgive her countrymen their sins, as he forgave the repentant thief. In support of her plea, the six succeeding movements present a procession of French saints through the ages: St Denis, taunted and beheaded by howling barbarians; the saintly St Clotilde; St Louis, personnifying the ideal of a mediaeval Christian ruler; Joan of Arc; St Vincent-de-Paul, the model of charity; and St Teresa of Lisieux, the contemporary model of holiness and humility. The Finale (recorded here with the composer’s own organ accompaniment) returns to Calvary, where France repeats her prayer. She is joined by the faithful people of France (double choir), whose intonation of the Easter Acclamation Christus vincit explodes into, and later mingles with, a contrapuntal tour-de-force in the form of a double fugue: Gloria in excelsis Deo! Christ replies from the Cross; with words paraphrased from the Beatitudes, he grants forgiveness, ‘because your saints, one by one, have embraced suffering without asking anything in return….’ David Gammie

Page revised Friday May 25 2007