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1981 Hartford CT Connecticut Trinity College Chapel Organ John Rose French Romantics Vol 4 Vinyl LP Record VG+
Record Grade per Goldmine Standard: VG+

THE FRENCH ROMANTICS: VOL4 JOHN ROSE, organ Organ of the Trinity College Chapel, Hartford, ConnecticutProduced and Engineered by Michael Nemo Charles-Marie Wider (1844-1937) Symphony for Organ, No. 5, Op. 42 Side One: (19:02) 1- 1st Mvt, Allegro Vivace (11:00) 2- 2nd Mvt, Allegro Cantabile (7:58) Side Two: (19:00) 1- 3rd Mvt,Andantino Quasi-Allegretto(6:10) 2- 4th Mvt,Adagio(6:29) 3- 5th Mvt,Toccata(6:10) Charles-Marie Widor introduced to France the grand virtuosic style of organ performance which so characterized what the world came to expect of the great Parisian organists on tour at the turn of the Century and for several decades into the Twentieth Century. He also completed the development of the symphonic form of composition for the organ which was to play such a major role in both the performances and compositions of those who followed in his steps such as Vierne and Dupre. His performance virtuosisty found its seeds in Belgium where he acquired the highly de- manding technical precision taught by Nicolas Jacques Lemmens (1823-1881) and based on a direct evolution of tutelage from the great J. S. Bach himself. Later he took the seeds of symphonic writing for the organ which had been planted by another Belgian, Cesar Franck (1822- 1890), and brought them to full bloom in his own ten symphonies for organ, thus giving shape to the literature which was to characterize the world's image of the style and sound of the Parisian organ school of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. As a composer for the organ, Widor's greatest source of inspiration was the magnificent five manual, 100 stop instrument at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. It was this instrument's builder, Aristide Cavaille-Coll (1811-1899) whose instruments brought the full orchestral tonal range to the organ, who helped secure Widor's appointment as organist of Saint-Sulpice in 1869. He held the post until ill health forced him to retire in 1933. As a teacher Widor held two major faculty posts at the Paris Conservatory. In 1890 he was appointed to succeed Franck as Professor of Organ, and six years later he also became Professor of Composition. Widor's students became leading composers and virtuoso per- formers of a glorious era, and their ranks include such diverse names as Louis Vierne, Albert Schweitzer, Marcel Dupre, Arthur Hon- negger, Darius Milhaud and Edgar Varese. Although Widor is remembered for his con- tributions to music, his own intellectual and artistic life embraced wide areas of personal interest and accomplishment. He was a re- spected critic, author and scholar who wrote verse in Greek and Latin as a hobby. For many years he was permanent secretary of the Aca- demic des Beaux-Arts and had been honored with membership in the Legion d'Honneur. His circle of musican friends spanned a diversity of styles and accomplishments, including names such as Massenet, Busoni, Dukas, Saint-Saens, Debussy and Rossini, and his circle of acquaint- ances encompassed politicians, writers, painters and, as Dupre recalls in his Recollections, "the entire Parisian artistic elite." Widor composed for a variety of instruments and ensembles, including the opera, but his most enduring works have been the ten organ sym- phonies. The first four, comprising his opus 13, were composed in 1872, the next two in 1881 and the 7th and 8th in 1890 with these latter four comprising opus 42. The final two sympho- nies, "Gothique" (IX) and "Romane" (X), are based on themes from Gregorian chant and date from 1900. The composer revised the initial eight symphonies between 1914 and 1918 and supervised their republication. In a preface to his first eight organ symphonies, Widor discussed the evolution in instrument building which fathered his approach to these compositions. "Old organs," he complained, had only "two colors: black and white, reeds and flue stops." The invention of the swell box was a major improvement but, according to Widor,. had little "artistic effect" on its own because "it was not possible to go beyond the limitations of a 30 note keyboard and an insignificant number of stops." Widor credits the solution to Cavaille-Coll's invention of, and utilization for the first time of, a variety of mechanical improvements along with the use of the swell box which greatly increased the performer's ability to control the instrument's production of sound, and to Cavaille-Coll's "invention of the family of harmonic stops...a flowering of wonderful colors, a rich palette of the most varied hues of hitherto unknown quality and variety." With these changes the organ became an "essen- tially symphonic" instrument in Widor's view. "The new instrument calls for a new language," he wrote, "for an ideal different from that of scholastic polyphony. It is no longer the Bach of the fugues we invoke, but the supremely expressive master of the 'B minor Mass', the cantatas and the 'St. Matthew Passion'....hence- forth the same care for combinations of timbres must be brought to compositions for the organ as has been the case for orchestral works." Even if Widor's composing career had been limited to one short piece—the final movement of his Fifth Organ Symphony—his name might still be prominent in the ranks of the French Romantic era composers. Aside from a handful of Bach pieces, this Toccata by Widor is probably performed by more organists and heard by more listeners than any other single piece of organ music in the course of a year. That the symphony is seldom performed in its entirety, and is therefore ironically something of an obscure work to organ audiences, probably says more about current vogues in music making than about the work itself. The first four movements succeed no less admirably than the last, and the work taken as a whole represents a pinnacle of achievement in the age of the French organ romanticists. notes by John Rose The Instrument: Austin Organ Co., 1971 The 78 rank organ in the chapel of Trinity College, Hart- ford, Connecticut, was installed by the Austin Organ Company in 1971. It was designed by Clarence Watters, former College Organist, and was unique in the United States in incorporating the French ventil system, an innovation of Cavaille-Coll. Prof. Watters as a young man had been a student of Marcel Dupre in Paris, and his love of the French literature is reflected in a design for the Trinity College instrument which makes it one of the finest in North America for the performance of music by “The French Romantics.” John Rose succeed- ed to the College Organist position when he became Artist-in-Residence at Trinity College in 1977. The instrument contains 65 stops, with 4,720 pipes in 78 ranks. It can be described as “Neo-Classic,” a 20th Century organ which employs the best principles of the past three centuries of organ building. In broad terms it comprises the “Pleno” or “Grand Jeu” of the 17th and 18th centuries on every division plus the brilliant Trompette choruses of the 19th century and the colorful solo stops of three centuries. The organ is built to oper- ate on low air pressures, following the conviction that low pressure is one of the reasons for the clarity and tonal beauty of the 17th and 18th century organs. Its console, unique in this country, adds to the American combination system the ventil system of the Cavaille- Coll organ, giving variety and ease of control in per- forming music of all periods. While most pipes are made of metal, the largest pipes are those of the 32‘ Untersatz, low CCCC being 32’ long and nearly 2’ square, built of pine, (the only stop retained from the old organ).





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