Review Details
MUSIC IN THE UNIVERSITY ORGAN RECITAL STEPHEN CLEOBURY
Alan Cooper
21 April 2009
King's College Chapel
A gratifyingly large audience turned out to welcome back Stephen Cleobury, the distinguished Director of Music and Organist of King’s College Cambridge to Aberdeen University’s own King’s College Chapel for the first University Music Recital following the Easter Break. The last time Stephen Cleobury played in the Chapel it was on the previous Chapel organ. This was his first recital on the Aubertin on the very day of the fourth anniversary of its “christening” by Dame Gillian Weir. The bulk of his programme was devoted to Northern European music namely the works of Buxtehude, Sweelinck and J. S. Bach with the French School represented by liturgical music from Messe pour les Paroisses by François Couperin. The rich full sound and contrapuntal textures of the Plein chant du premier Kyrie, en Taille or the Fugue sur les jeux d’anches while still having the full idiosyncratic flavour of the French Tradition did not sound at all out of place with the rest of the programme, after all, the French themselves often refer to Couperin Le Grand as “the French Bach”.
The recital opened and closed with the music of Bach’s great forerunner Dietrich Buxtehude. Both pieces by him had the vibrant energy and essential optimism that also colours much of Bach’s own organ music. The first piece, Toccata in F Major sounded decidedly merry while the magnificent work which closed the recital with its joyful second Fugue growing so naturally out of the rest of the piece illustrated just why Bach was willing to travel some two hundred and fifty miles just to hear this man play his music.
Sweelinck comes at least a generation before Buxtehude having been born some sixty five years earlier and it was for his Variations “Mein junges Leben hat ein End” that Stephen Cleobury used combinations of more antique sounding stops, a tactic that really brings the Aubertin into its own among organs. I especially admired the stunning variety of flute sounds and textures that Cleobury coaxed from the organ in this splendid piece.
Bach of course is the ultimate grand master of organ composition and three of his pieces made up the central core of Tuesday’s remarkable recital by Stephen Cleobury. O Lamm Gottes BWV 656 with its marvellous transformations of rhythm and pulse was followed by the Theme and Eleven Variations on Sei gegrüssst Jesu gütig BWV768. The gradual movement through the series of ever more elaborate and imaginative variations was so intriguing that the piece seemed to be over in just a few minutes and not the twenty or so that Stephen Cleobury mentioned. I think this was why the audience failed to applaud a mesmerising performance. I loved the jarring clashes of sound produced in the sections using the voix humaine stop.
The amazingly rich and complex counterpoint of Aus tiefer Noth schrei’ ich zu dir BWV 686 completed this glorious exposition of some of Bach’s finest organ music. Couperin’s music, including a spectacular Dialogue sur la Trompette et le Cromhorne followed, before we were back with Buxtehude and his Praeludium in g minor BuxWV 149, surely one of the most extrovert and joyfully extravagant pieces ever written for organ and played with such grand panache by Stephen Cleobury.