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~ Boulder Bach Beat hopes to stimulate conversations about the ways Bach’s music succeeds in building bridges between populations separated by language, culture, geography and time.

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Tag Archives: Paris Conservatoire

Marcel Dupré Showed France How to Embrace Bach

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Other Artists

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Advent, Albert Schweitzer, Alexandre Guilmant, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, Association des Amis de l’Art de Marcel Dupré, Catholic World Report, Charles de Gaulle, Charles-Marie Widor, chorale, chorale prelude, Editions Bournemann, First World War, Franck, French, Georges Clemenceau, Graham Steed, Gustave Ogier, H. W. Gray Publications, Honolulu, In dulci jubilo, Jeannette Dupré, Joan of Arc, John Cage, legato, leprosy, Louis Vierne, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Marcel Dupré, memorization, Michael Murray, Mount Everest, music publishing, Notre Dame, Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, Olivier Messiaen, op. 28, organ, Orgelbüchlein, Palais du Trocadéro, Paris, Paris Conservatoire, performance practice, Pierre Boulez, Protestant, R. J. Stove, radio, Radiodiffusion Française, Roman Catholic, Rouen, Second Vatican Council, Second World War, Seventy-nine Chorales for the Organ, sheet music, Spanish Civil War, Staphylococcus aureus, Thirty Years War, Van Nuys, Veni redemptor gentium

Marcel Dupré in 1948

Marcel Dupré in 1948

Among the last fifty years’ most unfortunate historical illiteracies has been the myth that it took Vatican II to bring about the most elementary courtesy between Catholics and non-Catholics. Before 1962, the legend goes, Catholics and Protestants were trapped in a kind of eternal Thirty Years’ War, lusting after the blood of our “separated brethren.” For a good answer to this legend, it is worth examining the manner in which Marcel Dupré – whom his star pupil Olivier Messiaen called “the greatest organ virtuoso who has ever lived” – first championed the organ repertoire of J. S. Bach for French concertgoers who, in the years after World War I, still knew very little of it.

Dupré died in 1971. For most of his long lifetime, he dominated the French organ scene, very much as his almost exact contemporary Charles de Gaulle dominated French politics. Today, neither man’s reputation is what it was. In particular it has become fashionable to snipe at Dupré’s Bach recordings, with their seamless legato and lack of concern for period practice. Yet this sniping is unjust, and one day the pendulum of taste will swing back. Dupré’s level of brilliance at the console cannot be discounted forever.

The impact that Bach left on Dupré’s thinking derived partly from the initial instruction he underwent. Born as he was in 1886 – at Rouen, where Joan of Arc remained potent in the communal culture – he had the privilege of knowing first-hand the Bach-loving, organ-building genius Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, who was then in the destitute but still deeply influential twilight of his career. Even Dupré was not quite old enough to have met his hero César Franck, but he achieved the next best thing: protracted study with Franck’s old colleague Alexandre Guilmant; with former Franck pupil Louis Vierne, the almost stone-blind Notre Dame organist; and with Charles-Marie Widor, whose Toccata has adorned a million weddings.

Through Widor and Guilmant above all, Dupré came to know the Bach tradition which had meant so much to Franck. But such knowledge, without the technique to convey it, was not nearly enough, and none appreciated this better than Dupré himself. In a 1948 interview for a Minnesota radio station, Dupré would utter the following credo: “To get perfection in a work, you must first get perfection in a short passage: that is the root of all virtuosity.” What Dupré preached, Dupré practiced, in one of France’s most unusual concert events from the interwar period.

The Great War had let Dupré off comparatively lightly. Traces of childhood disease (a near-fatal bout of golden staph) had destroyed his hopes of seeing active service, so he spent the years of combat in the pharmacy department of a Parisian military hospital. Army life has been described as “ninety-nine percent boredom to one percent terror,” and whilst Dupré’s hospital enjoyed the protection of distance from the worst fighting, the losses of several colleagues on the Western Front concentrated his mind wonderfully. Besides, hospital duties, by their very nature, enforce contact with human mortality in a fashion that very little other civilian employment does. Through a gradual process, Dupré concluded that he owed it to Bach, to music, and to whatever European civilization emerged after the war, to do something that had hitherto been thought not just pointless, but impossible.

In one sentence: Dupré vowed that with the advent of peace he would publicly play all of Bach’s known organ compositions from memory. He could not have horrified his supporters more if, like Albert Schweitzer, he had taken up the missionary life in western Africa, surrounded by lepers and goats. Earlier organists, for all their skill, had generally used the printed scores in their Bach performances. Widor probably knew as much Bach as any Frenchman of his time did, but even he had large gaps in his knowledge, gaps unimaginable in our own pampered epoch of cut-price complete editions.

Moreover, although Bach had not actually been banned from French musical life during 1914-1918, affronted Gallic national pride towards the vanquished foe made Dupré’s project seem quixotic amid the years of Georges Clemenceau’s vindictive prime ministry and calls for “squeezing Germany till the pips squeak.” Numerous Germans, for their part, assumed that the frivolous French could not comprehend Bach at all. Moreover, in the prevailing state of neurological science, it was by no means sure that the human brain was even built for so gigantic an amount of memorization as Dupré envisaged.

Through his ten concerts in 1920 at the Paris Conservatoire – concerts of Bach, the whole Bach, and nothing but Bach – Dupré proved his critics wrong. He repeated his feat the following year, at another venue in the same city: the Palais du Trocadéro, which then housed a Cavaillé-Coll masterpiece beloved of Guilmant and Franck. (During the late 1930s, it succumbed to a more than usually maladroit rebuilding, much to Dupré’s regret; in that decade, it is fair to suppose more organs were destroyed by insensitive renovations without the slightest political agenda, than were wrecked by even the most bellicose kerosene-toting communists and anarchists of the Spanish Civil War.) Widor happily paid homage to his former student’s success. In a nunc dimittis offered to Dupré’s father, Widor said: “I can die content, for I know the French organ school will remain in good hands.” (With characteristic recalcitrance, Widor didn’t die at all after delivering this heroic valediction. He lived on for another seventeen years, vigorously energetic till the end.)

At a creative level, Dupré’s devotion to Bach bore its most obvious subsequent fruit in his Seventy-nine Chorales for the Organ, op. 28 of 1931, commissioned by Gustave Ogier, a retired banker. Ogier found his enforced spare time somewhat oppressive and wanted to start playing the organ in earnest. Dupré easily met the implied challenge of providing material that (unlike his better-known symphonic epics for the King of Instruments) would be technically straightforward enough for Ogier to manage, but at the same time interesting enough for more experienced players to appreciate. Issued by H. W. Gray of Van Nuys, California – as opposed to Bornemann in Paris, which issued most of Dupré’s other works – the Seventy-nine Chorales became that unimaginable thing: an instance of organ sheet-music which actually made a profit. It has never gone out of print. Once, when Mme. Jeannette Dupré had accompanied her husband on a visit to one of Honolulu’s two cathedrals, “a copy of the Chorales [so reports England’s Dupré scholar Graham Steed] was lying open on the music rack of the organ.”

Evidence of Dupré’s profound esteem towards Bach’s own collection of miniatures, the Orgelbüchlein (BWV 599-644), is perceptible in every phrase. None of the Orgelbüchlein’s chorale preludes lasts for more than three pages. The same is true of Dupré’s collection. Bach based his pieces on Lutheran rather than Catholic melodies. So did Dupré. He tends to avoid those hymns where the same tune turns up in both Lutheran and Catholic contexts. (Admittedly a few instances do appear: In dulci jubilo is one; another is Nunn komm’ der Heiden Heiland, note-for-note the same as the plainchant theme Veni redemptor gentium in the traditional Catholic ceremonies for Advent.) But mere archeologism will nowhere be found. The Seventy-nine Chorales can at times administer a salutary shock to hearers – every congregation has them – who want all their organ music to suggest either syrup or lavender-water.

Dupré spent his last years, in musical terms, under something of a cloud. He found himself totally out of sympathy with the 1960s’ arbiters of French musical vogue: Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, and the rest. Ostensibly musical counterparts to the student gauchistes of May 1968 filled him with especial horror. His biographer and ex-student Michael Murray includes a dejected little anecdote of the octogenarian master confronted with an all-night avant-garde broadcast on French television:

Dupré watched for about fifteen minutes as “music” was made by the sole agency of a continually slamming door. Jeannette recalls that he turned to her sadly and said, “It is finished, done with, for the arts.” Nor was he heartened by her reply: “Nonsense! You’ll see. You say that music is finished, but look at your recitals and what do you see? You see that at least half of your audiences are young people. Look again. All is not ended for the arts.” But he could not be reassured.

Still, we have plenty of recorded evidence showing what Dupré the performer could achieve when at the height of his powers. (A gallant if cash-strapped nonprofit organization – the Association des Amis de l’Art de Marcel Dupré – does what it can to preserve his sonic legacy in ancient and modern repertoire alike, not to mention releasing his extant broadcasts for Radiodiffusion Française.) And still, like Everest, stands that extraordinary achievement of 1920–1921: Dupré’s practical demonstration that Bach was no mere dry-as-dust theoretician, but part of every Catholic’s and every Christian’s birthright.

R. J. Stove – Catholic World Report

The Walk to Fisterra

11 Sunday May 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Works, Films, Music Education, Other Artists, Video Recordings

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5.1 surround sound, acoustics, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Appalachian Trail, Barcelona, BIS, cello, Crouching Tiger Concerto, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Dane Johansen, El Camino de Santiago, Elliott Carter, Escher String Quartet, Fairbanks, Fisterra, Greg Stepanich, Joel Krosnick, Kickstarter, luthier, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Musilia, New York, Pablo Casals, Palm Beach ArtsPaper, Paris Conservatoire, Santiago de Compostela, Stefan Valcuha, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, Swedish, Tan Dun, The Cleveland Institute of Music, The Juilliard School, The Walk to Fisterra, Vasque, video, violin, violoncello

Fisterra, the "End of the World"

The end of the earth

One of Dane Johansen’s paternal ancestors helped oversee the transition of Alaska from czarist Russia to the United States in the late nineteenth century, and having grown up in Fairbanks as a sixth-generation resident of the Last Frontier, Johansen has been looking for a way to marry his love and knowledge of the outdoors with his career as a cellist.

He appears to have found it. This week, Johansen sets out on the Camino de Santiago, the six-hundred-mile trail in northern Spain traveled for centuries by pilgrims heading to city of Santiago de Compostela, and a road which was used for millennia before that as a path to the Fisterra peninsula, which ancient humans thought of as the literal end of the earth.

But he isn’t going as a religious pilgrim, nor is he in it just for the exercise. He’ll be bringing his cello with him – in a special extra-light, carbon-fiber case – as he walks the trail, and will stop in thirty-six churches along the way for the chief purpose of his walk: performing the six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12) of J. S. Bach, probably the nearest thing cellists have to a sacred text.

By the end of his trip, called “The Walk to Fisterra,” at the end of June, he’ll have played each of the suites eighteen times, in the home country of Pablo Casals, the cellist who rediscovered these great three-hundred-year-old pieces in a Barcelona music shop more than a century ago and did more than anyone else to establish them in their proper place as bulwarks of the literature.

“For all cellists, the Bach cello suites are sort of a lifelong quest, or at least for any cellist who chooses to take that path. When I play Bach’s music, it’s definitely the closest I get musically to some kind of meditation or prayer-like state,” Johansen said, speaking from his home in New York. “It’s such a personal thing, playing Bach’s music. Developing an interpretation is something that happens really slowly and very naturally, because you just play them and play them and play them, and they reveal more and more of their secrets to you.”

Johansen’s trip is about sixty-five percent funded on Kickstarter (the deadline is the thirteenth), and Johansen is still working to raise more money for the expedition. He’ll be accompanied by six other people – a producer, production assistant, two videographers and two audio engineers – who will be filming his journey and recording the music for future release as a documentary and a record.

“We’ve planned thirty-six concerts along the way, and they will all be recorded in 5.1 surround sound. And we’re hoping that the recording will help listeners experience the spaces as well,” he said. “If you’re listening to the recording later, you’ll feel as though you’re in that particular venue. And with the film aspect of this project, when you hear this music in the film, you’ll be looking at the space that you’re hearing, and so you’ll kind of be transported there visually and sonically.”

Johansen, the son of a civil engineer and a violin teacher, studied in his high school and undergraduate years at The Cleveland Institute of Music, following that with a year and a half at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, and finally getting his master’s and a performer’s certificate at The Juilliard School, where he now teaches as an assistant to the eminent American cellist Joel Krosnick and in the school’s pre-college division.

Johansen is also the cellist in the young Escher String Quartet, which will be releasing discs this year of the complete Mendelssohn quartets (on BIS, the Swedish label), and the four quartets of the Mahler acolyte Alexander von Zemlinsky (on Naxos).

On his own, Johansen performed Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto for his Lincoln Center debut in 2008, and in 2011, gave the New York premiere of the Crouching Tiger Concerto compiled by Chinese composer Tan Dun from his score for the 2000 Ang Lee film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In addition to his global appearances with the Escher String Quartet, he has performed in elite series such as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Marlboro Music Festival of Vermont.

Johansen said he first came up with the idea for the walk in 2008, thinking he would walk the trail with his cello by himself. He had gotten the inspiration from a composer friend who had walked the Appalachian Trail and had written a good deal of music while on the journey.

But the Appalachian Trail is largely wilderness, and while that was fine for the solitary occupation of composing, Johansen wanted to make a Bach journey on a more populated route. Taking the Camino de Santiago not only puts him in the same steps as the pilgrims who began using it in earnest in the early twelfth century, it also allows him to reach out to any number of contemporaries who happen to be there, and not only the young musicians from four Spanish conservatories with whom he’ll be doing some educational outreach on the trip.

“Everybody who walks the Camino walks that route with their own story and for their own reasons,” said Johansen, who will turn thirty in June while he’s on the road. “And I think that this music will help elevate their experience. Whatever their reason for walking the Camino, I think that there will be people sharing that experience with me that will be happier for the music, and who will enjoy their experience more for the music,” he said.

Johansen, who has been breaking in his Vasque hiking boots for the past few weeks, will be staying each night of the six-week journey in one of the many refugios on the path, though he added that some members of the production team may have to stay elsewhere from time to time for technical duties such as data downloads. His cello case, made by Germany’s Musilia, is a special reflective white to keep the heat to a minimum for his custom cello, built for him in 2011 by the New York-based luthier Stefan Valcuha.

Johansen said the origin of the Bach suites themselves are as shrouded in mystery as the pre-pilgrimage Camino. Most scholars believe the music to have been written before 1720, but the original manuscript is lost, and while the first five suites were written for the cello, the sixth one was written for a related five-string instrument of uncertain specificity. That doesn’t change the power of the music, which Johansen says he never tires of.

“When people ask me what my desert island book of music would be, it’s always the Bach suites because I never get tired of them,” he said. “I play them every day – not all of them every day – but I play Bach’s music every day, and I never get sick of it.”

His current favorite of the suites is the fifth one (BWV 1011), and he says the sarabandes of each of the suites are their spiritual centers.

“What he’s writing is at once really complex but also very simple . . . I like to try to figure out what was the idea that Bach was playing with in this movement. It seems to me that most of the movements have kind of a central concept that he must have been playing with. It could be something as simple as up and down, or stop and start, or push and pull.

“So I like to approach them in that way: What could he have been thinking with this material? What is this about?” he said. “I really don’t try to make them my own, because just by playing them, they’re my own . . . Every time I play them, I experience them as a new thing, like it’s the first time, and that’s something really special, something I don’t experience with any other composer or any other canon of music.”

Bringing something of that artistic journey to a completely new audience is vital not only for the Camino walk, but for being a performer in general, he said.

“I think as an artist when you’re taking on any kind of project, you have to make sure that your focus is outward, and that you’re trying to do something good for the world with your project,” Johansen said. “It’s ridiculous to say that an artistic project is not about the artist, because it’s impossible. You’re not going to have a meaningful product, or a meaningful experience, if someone hasn’t invested all of themselves.

“But the focus of all that energy can’t be inward. It has to be outward, and for me, that’s sharing this music with as many people as I can.”

Greg Stepanich – Palm Beach ArtsPaper

Marie-Claire Alain (1926-2013)

03 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Works, Memorials

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Albert Alain, Alexandre Guilmant, chorale prelude, complete works, Debussy, Erato, Franck, Geneva International Competition, Gramophone, Jehan Alain, Jeremy Nicholas, Lionel Rogg, Liszt, Louis Vierne, Marcel Dupré, Marcussen & Søn Orgelbyggeri, Marie-Claire Alain, Maurice Duruflé, Mendelssohn, organ, Paris Conservatoire, Poulenc, Wachet auf ruft uns die Stimme

MarieClaireAlaincropMarie-Claire Alain, the doyenne of French organists and the grande dame of the organ world, passed away on 26 February 2013. With over two hundred sixty recordings to her credit, she was arguably the most recorded organist and is only one of two people to have recorded the complete works of Bach three times (in the 1960s, 1978-1980 and the 1990s), the other being Lionel Rogg, as well as the complete works of twelve other composers. She made her first recording in 1954, Pièces inédites de Bach, on the new Erato label. It is reckoned that since her debut in 1950 she gave well over two thousand recitals world-wide.

Born, like Debussy, in the Paris suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Alain was the youngest child of a distinguished musical family and the last link in a direct line of celebrated French organists from Guilmant and Vierne, with whom her organist-composer father Albert studied, to Marcel Dupré and Maurice Duruflé, who were her teachers

Having left the Paris Conservatoire in 1950 after six years, carrying off four Premier Prix, she won second prize at the Geneva International Competition and began her solo career in earnest. This coincided with the time when the early music revival was gathering pace and the neo-classical movement in organ building was taking off. Alain was one of the first to play Bach on the new breed of organs, such as Marcussens in Denmark and Sweden, allowing listeners for the first time in generations to hear the contrapuntal writing with clarity – not exactly as Bach would have heard it – but on bright silvery instruments with balanced choruses. She was, in effect, in the vanguard of the new style of playing and adept at recording her chosen repertoire on the right instruments. But it was not just Bach and the Baroque in which she excelled, as her playing of Mendelssohn, Franck, Liszt, Poulenc and her brother Jehan Alain‘s music testifies.

Much sought-after as a teacher, Marie-Claire Alain was noted for her modesty and lack of ego, as well as for her warmth and patience with even the least talented of her pupils.

Here she plays the chorale prelude Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 645).

Jeremy Nicholas – Gramophone

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