Organ Recital by Renée Anne Louprette, presented by the Berkshire Bach Society, Saturday, February 10, at 2 p.m., at the Unitarian Universalist Church, Housatonic.
Program:
J. S. Bach, “Pièce d’Orgue,” Chorale Prelude “Nun komm der Heiden Heiland,” “Trio Sonata no. 1, first movement, Prelude and Fugue in E minor (“Wedge”)
Félix Mendelssohn, Organ Sonata Op. 65 no. 4
César Franck, Prélude, Fugue, et Variation, op. 18, and “Cantabile” from Trois Pièces pour Grand Orgue
The Johnson Organ at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Housatonic is an attractive instrument. Its tracker action (mechanical, not electric) makes it particularly suitable for older music like that of J. S. Bach. Its small but attractive range of colors and “modern” features (as of its construction date of 1893) are versatile enough for music of its own era, in this instance, organ compositions by Mendelssohn and César Franck dating from the mid-19th century. It has attracted some of the country’s finest organists, such as Peter Sykes and Renée Anne Louprette, who employed it for a wonderful program of all-baroque German organ music about one year ago, and who returned to perform on the instrument last Saturday.
(See my review of last year’s program for The Berkshire Edge here.
A music-loving crowd was also attracted on a sunny weekend afternoon. There are not many locales where that would be true: an unusual type of concert at an unusual time. But Berkshire music lovers are an atypical bunch, and the Bach Society knows its audience. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the Bach Society’s Advisory Board, but I had no input for this program.)
The makeup of the program demonstrated Bach’s far-reaching influence; as commentator George Stauffer put it, it could have been called “Bach and Beyond.” The juxtaposition of his works with two romantic composers justified this title and offered some remarkable contrasts. But in many ways, it was Bach who was already “beyond,” an extremist (according to Stauffer) who pushed the limits of whatever genre or form he was working in, always striving for great intensity of expression. The program was laid out symmetrically, with Mendelssohn in middle; Bach first, third, fifth, and last; and Franck sandwiched into each half. This layout invited comparisons.
In the first section of Bach’s “Piéce d’Orgue” (otherwise known as the “Fantasy in G”), a single line leaps forward with great and unflagging energy over a considerable time span, in the style of a toccata (which means “touch-piece” and implies rapidly flying figures and dynamic, athematic textures). The Organ Sonata by Mendelssohn superficially exhibited a similar style in its outer movements (of four), but despite his reverence for Bach, his important efforts toward the revival of his music, and his own use of baroque idioms, Mendelssohn’s sonata remained balanced, mannerly, and self-contained, owing more to Mozart than to Bach.
Closer spiritual kinship with Bach was shown by the later composer, Franck, whose “Prelude, Fugue, and Variation” was a fine choice as companion piece to Bach’s “Pièce…” Both works were in three highly contrasting sections that flowed together and integrated into one overall formal design. Following its opening toccata, the middle section of Bach’s work is a dense progression of five-voiced counterpoint developed at great length, the exact opposite of the initial “flying” material, but maintaining forward momentum in a compelling manner. The final section acted as a dramatic release from this weightiness into ever more dynamic “flying” toccata figures. The total effect was thrilling.
Franck’s Prelude combines graceful arpeggio figures with a long, flowing single line (“endless melody” in the post-Wagnerian sense), which is to be played on an oboe stop. A brief harmonic link leads to a fugue whose complex interactions among four voices contrasts sharply with the preceding section. The third section (notice the singular “variation”) returns to the long melody on the oboe stop, but with accompanying arpeggio figures that have doubled in speed, offering toccata-like fleetness and greater forward flow. Bach and Franck were both great organists, adept at improvisations that could continue at great length, making use of the technique of wandering from one key to another, apparently at random but with an overall tonal design kept in mind. (Franck was once asked by a student how he could keep creating so much material on the spot; he is supposed to have answered simply, “Modulate, modulate!”)
The “extremism” that Franck shares with Bach starts with his rich, wide-ranging harmonic palette. Both composers make ample use of chromaticism (wandering from one scale to another) and dissonance; but Franck, under the influence of Wagner, goes further afield tonally, with constant surprising shifts that keep upping the large-scale formal tension, always with coherent transitions from one emotional state to the next and leading to a satisfying overall resolution. Another shared characteristic is the extent to which Franck, like Bach, develops his material out of small melodic motives. A third resemblance is their way of developing musical textures in layers and counterpoint, coming directly from the possibilities afforded by the multiple keyboards and stops of the organ. Franck’s inclusion of a fugue is almost an hommage to the earlier master, and this somewhat gnarly section, with its rhythmic (and harmonic) ambiguity, sets up challenges for the listener of which Bach would likely have approved.
Other Bach works on the program justified the adjective “extreme” in different ways. The chorale prelude “Nun komm der Heiden Heiland” (one of his most familiar in that genre) shows how far a composer can go in ornamenting underlying melodic material (the chorale) to evolve an apparently new melody in which every detail is a necessary part of the design. (This was appropriately compared to what Charlie Parker might do to transform a tune like, for example, “Embraceable You.”) In the single movement from Organ Sonata no. 1 (from a set of six composed to stretch the pedal technique of his son Wilhelm Friedemann), Bach offered the performer an extreme challenge, that of conducting a continuous conversation among three fully developed voices requiring full use of both hands and feet. Finally, the concluding Prelude and Fugue in E minor demonstrated once more Bach’s ability to generate great intensity through extensive, even exhaustive development of material. The longest such work that Bach wrote, it includes a fugue subject that expands from smaller to ever larger oscillating intervals, earning the nickname “wedge fugue.” Expansiveness extends to the form: The subject statements occur on all seven steps of the scale, interspersed with dynamic interludes that keep the momentum of the music hurtling forward up to the final cadence.
Renée Anne Louprette’s performances were commanding and attractive, doing full justice to all the works on the program. The wide range of styles shown in Bach’s own work and among the three composers could have led to a “smorgasbord” experience, but the selection, order, and coherence of the performances offered instead an integrated, balanced, and satisfying concert experience. In her modest post-performance comments, Louprette discussed the muscular effort required by the tracker mechanism since the more stops that are pulled (i.e., the louder and more grandiose the combination of pipes) the greater the physical effort needed to depress the keys, and even apologized for wrong notes. I noticed, however, a grand total of one out of the hundreds of thousands of notes played. In addition to the video screen showing the pedal work, an additional element of visual (and audible) drama was the pulling of the stops. In the Franck works, this was required mid-piece; since the performer’s hands and feet were fully occupied at such moments, an assistant (one of her students), otherwise stationed to turn the pages, traveled to the other side of the instrument to draw the specified stops at precisely coordinated moments. Who says that organ recitals lack drama? Not so here.
The audience can look forward to a contrasting but no less engaging organ performance on April 13 at the Great Barrington Congregational Church when the mighty Roosevelt Organ (not a tracker) will be played by Peter Sykes. How will this compare with the present performance? I will let you know after it happens.
