Review Details
PLAINCHANT AND ORGAN
Alan Cooper
28 April 2009
King's College Chapel
I have always enjoyed the “Inspector Morse” series on television. Although I can rarely follow every detail of the plots, I love the music and the atmosphere generated by the programme. Tuesday’s concert given by Roger B Williams along with King’s College Chapel Schola held the same irresistible appeal. A full understanding of the finer points of Alternatim performance will require a lot more reading and study but I loved the music and the atmosphere created by Tuesday’s recital. The 9.00pm start, along with the softly subdued lighting in the Chapel, added something special to the aura surrounding music by Nivers, Boyvin and Frescobaldi with which the Aubertin organ sounds so completely at home.
In the seventeenth century, Guillaume Gabriel Nivers was organist at Saint Sulpice where Widor and Marcel Dupré were later to play a very different type of organ in more modern times. Jacques Boyvin, born in Paris around thirty-three years after Nivers, became organist at Rouen Cathedral following in the footsteps of Jehan Titelouze whom many regard as the father of the French School of organ playing. Girolamo Frescobaldi was organist of St Peters in Rome and J. S. Bach must have admired him since in his youth he copied out the Fiori Musicali from which the Kyrie which Roger Williams was to play is taken. Incidentally, this was not the first concert at which we heard Roger Williams play music by G. G. Nivers. In April of 2007, Roger interposed music by Nivers as a leavening between pieces by senior students and staff at the University.
Tuesday’s recital began and ended with Alternatim performances of the Magnificat, the first in mode (i) (First book, 1665) by Nivers, the second, Boyvin’s setting in mode (viii) (Second Livre d’ Orgue, 1700). In the middle and standing proud was Frescobaldi’s setting of the Kyrie (Fiori Musicali, 1635) flanked by plainsong performances of the Pange Lingua: Plainchant mode (iii) and Victimae Paschali laudes: Plainchant mode (i).
I would like to find out more about the significance of the sequences of the various modes but as I have said what struck me was the atmosphere created by the sounds of the singing and the organ playing. The three voices that provided the passages of plainsong alternating with organ in the Kyrie or the two Magnificats sounded luminous, perfectly seamless and well focused. In the Pange Lingua and the Victimae Paschali laudes they were joined by Roger Williams himself, allowing for a perfectly balanced alternation of a different sort, between male and female voices.
The Aubertin as I have often said is an ideal instrument, full of wonderful characteristic sounds, able to provide the particular unique blends prescribed by the early French composers for their music. The Recit de Voix humaine, the marvellous Echo and the resounding Plein jeu in the setting by Nivers were matched in Boyvin’s setting by a dance-like Trio deux dessus then a Recit grave which sounded more seductive than grave and to finish, a dazzling Dialogue en Fugue sans tremblant.
Back in the summer of 1967 I spent several months translating into English a book entitled L’Orgue Français by Norbert Dufourq. This was for the late Duncan Johnson. Only now, all these years later, I am just beginning to understand what Dufourq really meant when he was describing all these special sounds. Well, better late than never!