After coming to prominence as resident organist of the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Iveta Apkalna has most recently been to the Far East, where in 2018 she inaugurated Asia's largest concert organ in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She has now recorded her new album on the organ at the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying). It is an impressive instrument: Almost 10,000 pipes in over 120 registers, located in a twin organ. On the right-hand half of the stage is the great symphonic organ, which recreates the aesthetic timbre of the French Romantic style. And on the left there is the smaller "echo organ", oriented on the German Baroque repertoire. On this new album, Iveta Apkalna has compiled a programme that unites the two organs by placing the focus on the French Romantic style and making a brief foray to the father of organ music, J.S. Bach.

The programme presented here is particularly interesting from the point of view of Henri Vieuxtemps's Grande sonate concertante op.12, in four movements, a rare work written during the youth of the Verviers composer. Tatiana Samouil won the Grand Prix Vieuxtemps in Verviers in 1998, just after her arrival in Belgium. This prize marked the start of her major international career. She went on to win prizes at the Queen Elisabeth, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky competitions... Henri Vieuxtemps always held a special place in the heart of the violinist, who dreamt of giving the Vieuxtemps sonata a new lease of life in concert halls and on recordings. Her meeting with the brilliant Belgian pianist Johan Schmidt, winner of several major international competitions (Queen Elisabeth, Van Cliburn, Tchaikovsky...) was to make her wish come true! Tatiana Samouil and Johan Schmidt started from the original manuscript to create a new version of the score that is more accessible and readable in terms of interpretation and sound. Louis Vierne's Sonata for violin and piano in G minor Op.23, another rare gem dedicated to Eugene Ysa�e, is considered to be his first major chamber music score and his first unanimously acknowledged masterpiece. It is a masterly work, full of strength, passion and tenderness. A CD between romanticism and modernity that illustrates the stylistic evolution of the French aesthetic with it's characteristics of clarity, balance and elegance.

LOUIS VIERNE: PIÈCES DE FANTAI

Most organists intent on recording the darkly glittering organ symphonies of Louis Vierne head for the Gothic Abbaye de St Ouen in Rouen - Jeremy Filsell no exception. The attraction is to play the music on the last great organ masterpiece of the iconic and innovatory French builder, Aristide Cavaille-Coll, inaugurated in 1890 by Vierne's teacher Charlies-Marie Widor; whether in Rouen, Paris or elsewhere, the heart of late 19th/early 20th-century French organ music beats to the pulse of Cavaille-Coll.

Vierne (1870-1937) was the prodigiously gifted titular organist of Notre Dame de Paris for over 40 years; beset by blindness and a string of personal tragedies, Vierne's complex personality found vivid expression in the symphonies; composed in a rising scale of minor keys, they build on orchestral technique by elaborating a few main themes symphonically; the two post-World War I symphonies (5 & 6) reflect contemporary trends by pushing the bounds of conventional tonality.

Listeners already engaged by concert organists' cherry-picking from the many thrilling movements in these symphonies will find exposure to the full cyclical structures of the complete works immensely rewarding. Filsell, famously untroubled by technical demands, concentrates on wringing every last drop of sonority in deeply felt, idiomatic performances. His detailed notes on Vierne's life and the music are exemplary - the booklet further enhanced by his personal insights into the recording process, and the organ's idiosyncracies. Some might hanker for a closer microphone experience of the organ, but otherwise, in the face of stiff competition from Ben van Oosten's four-CD set on MDG, Filsell's three-CD package registers as complete in every way.

Graeme Kay, BBC Music

Classical Music

Organ Symphony No. 1 Op. 14

Classical Music

Classical Music

A pupil of Cesar Franck and Widor, Louis Vierne (1870-1937) was an influential organist, holding posts in such venues as the Notre Dame in Paris, where he was widely celebrated. Vierne’s works are characterized by complicated counterpoint, dense harmonies, and an exalted atmosphere. His Piano Quintet, featured on this disc, was inspired by the death of Vierne’s child, and displays an overwhelming emotional intensity. “Spleens et detresses” is a work based on poems by Verlaine. The song cycle exudes a feeling of mystical emotion.

Classical Music

Louis Vierne (October 1870 - June 1937) will go down to posterity mainly as an organist, although he could have made a name for himself in every domain with the sole exception of the theatre. Born nearly blind, in 1880 he heard Franck for the first time at St. Clotilde and was later accepted by him as a private pupil. While at the Institute for Young Blind Children, he studied piano, organ, and violin, which benefitted his chamber music production. It was during his 1750th concert, when he had just played "Tombstone for a Dead Child," that he was struck down by a cardiac embolism in the organ loft of Notre Dame. Featured Artist Jean Dub�: piano

Both already accomplished soloists, violinist Judith Ingolfsson and pianist Vladimir Stoupel began an outstandingly successful collaboration in 2006, devoting their partnership to chamber music and cultivating uncommon repertoire. The music on this album is dedicated to composer Louis Vierne (1870-1937), whose life was marked by unfortunate events and was influenced greatly by the first world war. This album includes Vierne’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in G minor, and his Piano Quintet in C minor. Ingolfsson and Stoupel are joined by violinist Rebecca Li, violist Stefan Fehlandt, and cellist Stephan Forck for this recording.

Louis Vierne (1870-1937) undoubtedly led the Organ Symphony to it's stylistic climax. In the tradition of this original French genre he stands in line with his teachers and pioneers C�sar Franck and Charles-Marie Widor. The last two relevant works were written in 1924 and 1930. AEOLUS has already published Symphonies No. 1-4 with Daniel Roth on the famous Aristide Cavaill�-Coll organ (1862) of Saint-Sulpice in Paris in recent years. For the last episode he kindly left 'his' instrument to his younger colleague Stephen Tharp from New York. Stephen Tharp, hailed as "the organist for the connoisseur" (organ - Journal f�r die Orgel, Germany), "the thinking person's performer" (Het Orgel), "every bit the equal of any organist" (The American Organist" magazine) and "the consummate creative artist" (Michael Barone, Pipedreams), is recognized as one of the great concert organists of our age.

VIERNE Organ Symphonies (complete): No. 1 in d, op. 14; No. 2 in e, op. 20; No. 3 in f?, op. 28; No. 4 in g, op. 32; No. 5 in a, op. 47; No. 6 in b, op. 59 • Martin Jean (org) • LOFT LRCD 1071/74 (4 CDs: 218:20)


Say “symphony,” and one thinks orchestra. Say “organ symphony,” and one thinks Saint-Saëns. The two words in combination don’t usually bring to mind a work for organ alone; yet for Louis Vierne (1870–1937) and quite a few others, a symphony for solo organ made perfect sense. Born 26 years earlier than Vierne but dying in the same year, the long-lived Charles-Marie Widor wrote 10 organ symphonies between 1872 and 1900, completing all but the last of them well before Vierne composed his first in 1899.


The idea of a symphony for solo organ may have been planted as early as 1863 by César Franck with his Grande pièce symphonique , but another man played a determinant role in this quintessentially French phenomenon, and his name was Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, the most famous French organ builder of his time. He and the company he founded revolutionized the art and science of organ design and construction. They also established a new aesthetic for organ sound, which, for want of a better term, could be called the modern, grand theater organ.


Of crucial significance to the explosion of French organ works during this period was Cavaillé-Coll’s creation of whole new families of stops and of voicing and coupling mechanisms that allowed an organ to imitate virtually every instrument of the orchestra. This enabled composers to write for the organ as if it were a symphony orchestra. From Widor to Vierne, Charles Tournemire, Marcel Dupré, Jean Langlais, and a host of others barely known to us today—Augustin Barié, Émile Bourdon, Alexandre Cellier, André Fleury, and Léonce de Saint-Martin—organ symphonies poured forth.


While it can’t be said that Vierne’s organ symphonies have been neglected on record, they haven’t received as much attention as Widor’s. The blockbuster Toccata movement alone from Widor’s Fifth Organ Symphony has amassed nearly 100 recordings. Comparisons of the two composers’ works may not be fair, but they’ll be made anyway. Mark Swed, music critic for the Los Angeles Times , reviewing Christopher Houlihan’s live performance at Our Lady of Angels Cathedral in June 2012, described Vierne’s symphonies as “gloomily gothic,” but went on to say that Debussy thought highly of them and that Vierne influenced Messiaen.


It’s true that the music isn’t as outgoing or demonstrative as Widor’s—note that all six symphonies are in minor keys—and much of it is in a later, more modernistic style, but having come to terms with Vierne’s vernacular, the music has an increasingly cumulative power that is both moving and disturbing; Swed calls it “spooky.”


One thing that may be an issue if you’re considering purchase of this new set is that the long-in-the-catalog Jeremy Filsell set takes three CDs to Loft’s four. On its original Signum label—still available and selling for $55.49 at ArkivMusic—it was reviewed as part of an eight-disc set by Haig Mardirosian in 18:3. In its three-disc reduction, it’s still more expensive than this new Loft release, which is selling for $48.99. But here’s the catch: the Filsell set on Signum has been reissued by Brilliant Classics and is selling for $21.99. I can’t speak of Filsell’s performances, because I don’t have his set, but I do question why Loft had to take four discs, averaging just over 54 minutes each, to accomplish what Signum (and now Brilliant Classics) did in three. The set I do have is with organist Ben van Oosten on MDG, and it too is spread over two two-disc sets, so I can’t make too much of a fuss over this. What it finally comes down to for me are the organs.


Oosten performs the symphonies on three authentic Cavaillé-Coll instruments in Rouen, Lyon, and Toulouse. For the current set, Martin Jean has chosen the Newberry Memorial Organ in Woolsey Hall at Yale University, an instrument originally built in 1902 by the Hutchings-Votey Company, and subsequently updated in 1915 by Massachusetts builder J. W. Steere & Son, and again in 1928 by Boston builder Skinner. The term “mighty organ” never applied more fittingly than it does to this colossus of an instrument. Pictured in the booklet is the console with four keyboard manuals plus pedal and a surrounding array of buttons and knobs that would make a jumbo jet pilot jealous. The detailed specifications list 142 stops in eight divisions, totaling 12,617 pipes. Bach would wet himself.


The Cavaillé-Coll organs heard in Oosten’s recordings are no harmoniums, but they’d have the wind knocked out of them by Yale’s Newberry. The largest of them, the Rouen, also has four manuals plus pedal, but a mere 64 stops, fewer than half the Newberry’s. Next largest is the Toulouse Cavaillé-Coll with only three manuals plus pedal and 57 stops, followed by the Lyon organ with three manuals plus pedal and a measly 45 stops. The Lyon organ was apparently sufficient for the needs of Widor who inaugurated it in 1880. The Toulouse organ was inaugurated by Alexandre Guilmant in 1889; and in 1890, Widor was once again called upon to inaugurate the Rouen organ, one of the very last and considered by some the greatest of Cavaillé-Coll’s grand masterpieces.


If it’s beginning to sound like I favor Oosten’s versions of Vierne’s symphonies over Martin Jean’s, I’d have to say that’s only half true. Oosten’s MDG recordings suffer from the not uncommon “church” acoustic problem of long decay time and reverberation that tend to muddy the textures. In Vierne, this is not necessarily a bad thing, if you subscribe to Swed’s “spooky” description of the music, which in Oosten’s performances can suggest the soundtrack to a gothic horror. I say this is not necessarily a bad thing because it could be argued that the Impressionist blurring and pre-Messiaen klangfarbenmelodie are precisely what Vierne’s symphonies call for.


On the other hand, it you prefer to hear the music in a drier concert hall acoustic, Martin Jean’s superb performances, aided by Yale’s Woolsey Hall setting, cast these works in an entirely different light. Suddenly, voicing and contrapuntal lines are clarified, lifting from the music its eerie fog that must surely shroud something evil in its mists. Listening to Vierne in these two recordings is like listening to two different composers. Oosten’s version may be closer to what Vierne would have heard, since the Cavaillé-Coll organs were of his time and place, but I like both Oosten’s and Jean’s performances almost equally. I would have to give the edge, though, to the new Jean, both for the clarity of his playing and for the sharpness of Loft’s recording.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Pas de Dieu: Music Sublime & Spirited