Thinking about 20th-century French music after Debussy and Ravel, the names of Messiaen and the members of Les Six would probably spring to mind. However, at the same time organists like Vierne, Tournemire, Alain, Langlais and Dupre himself were writing music every bit as original and as intense as the aforementioned composers. One of the many benefits of Guild’s series (which concludes with these three volumes) is the opportunity to discover just how fine a composer Dupre was. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries he managed to embrace both the sacred and the secular with utter conviction.
Le chemin de la croix is one of his major works and is a landmark piece of musical drama. One can hear links with the Symphonie-Passion of six years earlier, and David Gammie in his comprehensive accompanying notes points out the influence of these works on Durufle’s Requiem and Messiaen’s Les corps glorieux. Filsell gives a suitably dramatic performance with some telling rallentandos at climactic moments.
All three compositions on Volume 11 were inspired by Gregorian chant, and each movement is preceded on this CD by the singing of the verse on which it’s based. The vocal quartet includes the CD’s producer Adrian Peacock and Filsell himself – an inspired and appropriate piece of programming. Listening to Filsell’s flowing, atmospheric playing it’s easy to imagine oneself sitting in a vast, incense-laden Parisian church, with glorious improvised music coming from the west-end grand orgue.
Dupre is remembered for writing music of extreme technical complexity, but Volume 12 shows that he was well capable of composing pieces for organs and organists of modest resources. The 79 Chorales take hymn tunes which were all used by Bach as the basis for chorale-preludes. Many of Dupre’s chorales are effective Bachian pastiches, but a handful of them have the unmistakable 20th-century French idiom. Again, Filsell’s performances are beyond reproach, and he shows that Dupre was able to match JSB for solemnity and piety.
As is so often the case Naxos provides healthy competition, and Volume 11 of its Dupre series has a very fine performance of Le chemin de la croix from Mary Preston. She brings a greater clarity to the music, helped by the drier acoustic of the Meyerson Symphony Center at Dallas. However, Filsell in the more resonant acoustic of St Boniface Church, Sarasota, Florida brings more warmth, passion and drama to his interpretations, and this, coupled with Gammie’s excellent insert-notes sways the balance in favour of the Guild series.
In all 12 volumes Filsell’s playing has been consistently superb, and what has been most impressive is that his virtuosity has always been the servant of the music. The St Boniface organ may not have the eclat of a Cavaille-Coll, but its clarity and attack enhance Dupre’s complex textures, and the recordings are suitably warm and atmospheric. One hopes Guild will now record Dupre’s vocal, chamber and orchestral works; meanwhile we must salute Filsell for one of the greatest achievements in organ recordings