Top-Rank Organ Playing

E-mail
Print
Comment
Resize

The composer Ned Rorem once said that he didn’t particularly enjoy going to organ recitals, because the live acoustics in churches prevented him from properly hearing the music. He thought that other organists, who are used to hearing through the acoustical fog, mostly made up the audiences for these recitals. Whatever the accuracy of those statements, Ian Tracey’s long association with Liverpool Cathedral and its cavernous acoustics served him well in his recital Sunday at Grace Cathedral.

Tracey opened his recital with two short transcriptions, the first a rigaudon by Jean-Baptiste Lully and then Le Coucou by Louis-Claude Daquin. His playing exhibited an adept and somewhat slick aspect, though without being tacky or pushing the bounds of taste. His consistent articulation and unerring sense of rhythm kept the music clear and propulsive, and his registration was well-chosen to highlight the brighter sounds of the organ in the former piece, as well as some of its charming colors in the latter.

For those listeners who were hoping for greater musical substance, Tracey performed J.S. Bach’s monumental Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. He prefaced the performance with an announced apology that his approach to this piece would no doubt be considered rather dated by the “men with the white coats.”

Now, as someone who has often identified with those self-same persnickety types, I will say that I have a great deal of respect for the early music movement. I cannot, for example, listen to Baroque chamber music by any performers who do not at least give a nod toward those who play on period instruments. At the same time, some idiosyncrasies that have grown out of the movement make no musical sense.

One shining example is to play the Passacaglia and Fugue on the plenum, that is, on the full chorus of principal and mixture stops, some reeds, and what-have-you. Don’t worry if you’re not sure what these words mean; just know that it makes the organ quite loud. Imagine, then, listening to 15 minutes of dense counterpoint on sounds like this, and you will understand how unbalanced the doctrine is.

Balanced Performing Style

Tracey’s interpretation, which called for changing the organ’s sound on each of the 20 variations of the theme, predates the monolithic “purist” approach by at least 100 years. Playing it this way, though, is far more musical, not to mention more user-friendly for the audience. Thus, his apology was really unnecessary. (It should be noted that others who are more associated with the early music movement are also beginning to rethink their interpretation, so it’s good to know that things are coming full circle.)

Despite his manifesto against the “white coats,” however, Tracey did play the piece at a good clip. To me, it seemed too breathless, and the interesting registrations he used went by far too fast to take hold in the imagination. Oddly, the pace seemed to be more of a nod to contemporary early music tastes, as anyone who is familiar with the ever-increasing tempos in Baroque performances knows. The fugue, too, was on the upper edge of comfort, though his consistent articulations held it together.

Few pieces are as well-suited to Grace Cathedral’s acoustics as Cesar Franck’s Fantaisie en La. The work, which is replete with dramatic pauses and some of the most otherworldly musical sequences ever written, possesses a formal clarity that matches anything Franck wrote, including his great Symphony in D Minor. Tracey’s sensitive phrasing and his ability to duplicate the reedy in-your-face quality of French organs easily transported the audience to 19th-century Paris.

Music Matched to the Instrument

Just as the Franck was well-suited to the Grace organ, the two pieces that followed, Joseph Bonnet’s Variations de Concert and Pierre Cochereau’s Scherzo Symphonique, fit the performer’s exuberant technique to a T. The Bonnet piece is an old barnburner filled with improvisatory passages, while the second is actually a written-down version of a tape-recorded improvisation (Cochereau, organist at Notre Dame de Paris from 1955 to 1984, was a phenomenal improviser who set down little music on paper, and the transcription was made after he died).

At first hearing, the Scherzo sounds like a lot of fluffy French fury, but once you realize that it was probably made up on the spot it is truly impressive. As a piece of music, however, it didn’t stand up as well to the other pieces in the program, music that was actually written down before it was performed. In any case, the organist delivered both pieces with technical aplomb and with more interpretive respect than they perhaps warranted. He closed the program with Flor Peeters’ Toccata: Lied to the Sun, a piece that makes me wonder why more of Peeters’ music is not performed, its technical difficulty notwithstanding.

Throughout the recital, Tracey’s playing was intimate when it needed to be and showy when it was called for, and in no way was the music compromised. If, as Rorem thought, only the anointed can appreciate an organ recital, then we need more players of Ian Tracey’s caliber and temperament to bring the uninitiated back into the fold.

John Karl Hirten is an active organ recitalist and composer living in the San Francisco Bay Area.