Dupré: Three Preludes and Fugues, op. 7; Fifteen Versets for Vespers of Common Feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary, op. 18; Cortège et Litanie, op. 19; Variations sur un Noël, op. 20
Jean-Pierre Lecaudey, organ
Pavane Records ADW 7382. Format, 67:05—Dupré remains one of music’s most stubbornly neglected figures. Outside the tight fraternity of organists and their devoted listeners, he might as well not exist—and that is a genuine scandal, given the scale of his achievement. Two thousand, one hundred and seventy-eight recitals. Let that number sit for a moment. An improviser of staggering fluency, a contrapuntist who could reasonably be mentioned alongside Bach without embarrassment, and a teacher whose pupils included Messiaen. Yet here we are, in 2002, still having to make the case.
Lecaudey makes it persuasively.
For this recording he has turned to the Pascal Quoirin instrument in the Collegiate Church of St. Martin at St. Rémy-de-Provence, rebuilt between 1977 and 1983—considerably more substantial than the Castres organ he played in a recital I reviewed separately. The Quoirin’s full organ is a far more agreeable sound: warm where the Castres instrument could turn harsh, and possessed of a particularly gorgeous flute department that proves indispensable in the G minor Prelude’s headlong rush of semiquaver triplets. Remarkable rhythmic accuracy, that passage—the kind of thing that separates genuine organists from mere technicians who happen to have large hands.
The three early Preludes and Fugues, op. 7, are uneven in their reputation. The B major and G minor get played; the F minor, considerably less flamboyant than its companions, tends to be overlooked. Lecaudey gives it an immaculate performance—the counterpoint laid out with a clarity and balance that feels almost editorial in its precision, as though he’s determined to make you hear every voice separately. He succeeds.
Then the op. 18 Versets, rooted in plainchant, mostly devotional in their quiet intensity—and then, suddenly, a blazing concluding Toccata that reminds you exactly who wrote this music. Dupré’s improvisational origins are audible throughout: these pieces have the quality of thought caught in the act, of a musical mind working in real time. That’s rarer than it sounds.
Cortège et Litanie carries a hypnotic little ostinato figure that will strike any attentive listener as eerily familiar—it anticipates Jehan Alain’s Litanies with an uncanniness that raises interesting questions about influence and parallel discovery. I don’t know the answer. But the resemblance is striking enough to stop you cold the first time you notice it.
The Variations sur un Noël closes the program, and rightly so—it’s the showpiece, the work most likely to be familiar, and Lecaudey dispatches it with both intellectual rigor and genuine excitement. The canonic writing—at the second, fourth, and octave in turn—never becomes merely academic; Dupré keeps the harmonic tension alive underneath. And the final Toccata, with the 32’ Bombarde finally unleashed, is simply thrilling. The disc captures it without distortion, which is no small feat.
One small but telling detail worth noting: Lecaudey ends his chords cleanly. Crisply, decisively, without that maddening English habit of letting final sonorities decay into the next geological era. It sounds like a small thing. It isn’t.
Thoroughly recommended. I want volume two on my desk as soon as possible.
