Franck Early Organ Works – Jo Verdin

The organ and I have never quite made peace. Too much of the repertoire seems designed to flatten the listener into submission — all that rolling thunder, all that ceremonial grandeur pressing down like a velvet slab. So it was with modest expectations that I came to this Ricercar two-disc set of César Franck’s early organ music, played by Jo Verdin on what is claimed to be one of the oldest surviving Cavaillé-Coll instruments. What followed was, genuinely, a surprise.

Franck in his youth was prodigiously, almost recklessly productive. Thirty-seven of the forty-two pieces here come from that early period — miniatures, most of them, liturgical workhorses written to fill the silences between prayers at Saint-Jean-Saint-François in the Marais, where the young Belgian immigrant was making his way in Paris. We know the late Franck so well: the Prélude, Choral et Fugue, the organ chorales that smell of incense and eschatology, the Symphony in D minor with its cyclic obsessions. This is the other Franck entirely — lighter on his feet, less weighed down by Germanic seriousness, not yet convinced that profundity requires labor.

The pieces themselves are brief. Startlingly so, in some cases — a Grand Choeur lasting barely a minute, an Andantino gone before you’ve settled into it. That brevity turns out to be an asset, not a limitation. It keeps Verdin honest, and it keeps the listener alert.

And Verdin is very good. The ppp playing in the “Elévation” — hushed, almost inward, the pipes barely breathing — achieves something that the organ rarely achieves: genuine reticence. The instrument cooperates. This Cavaillé-Coll, wherever its precise date, has the warmth and vocal quality that Aristide Cavaillé-Coll prized above mechanism, above spectacle. It sings rather than declaims.

Not always quietly, of course. There’s a brash, marching grandiloquence in some of the Grand Choeurs that Verdin plays absolutely straight — no apology, no irony, full swagger. Right too. The young Franck wasn’t embarrassed by the festive mode. The “Allegretto” on the first disc has a piping, pastoral innocence that called to mind — unexpectedly — the shepherd’s theme in the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz’s odd seasonal magic. Whether Franck knew that music in 1841 or 1842 I couldn’t say for certain, but the Paris of those years was Berlioz’s Paris, and something of that air was clearly circulating.

The second disc has a slightly lower temperature overall — the inspirational peak belongs to the first — but it’s far from negligible. An “Offertoire pour la Messe de Minuit” glows with a simple radiance, the kind of effect that only the organ, at its best, can produce: light made sound. The “Offertoire en sol mineur” has the Bachian assertiveness you might expect from a composer who had recently been studying the Well-Tempered Clavier with the near-fanaticism of a convert. And there is a “Sortie en ré majeur” that skips along with almost impudent good humor, which is not a quality one readily associates with the Franck of legend.

These pieces spent a long time in manuscript. They were published only after Franck’s death — belatedly, incompletely — and have never really entered the standard repertoire. That neglect is understandable. Organists tend toward the monumental. But the neglect is also a loss, and Verdin has made a persuasive case for looking again.

The comparison that kept occurring to me was with Sibelius’s Humoresques — not obviously, not in any surface way, but in the sense that both represent a composer thinking aloud in miniature, with a concentration and a natural poetry that longer forms sometimes dissipate. Brief doesn’t mean slight. These pieces nourish.

The Ricercar production is handsome: a triple-segment digicase with the booklet tucked into a central panel pocket, essays in French and English, well-documented. One wishes the catalog numbers in the notes were organized a bit more intuitively, but that’s a small complaint.

Decisive verdict: if you play the organ, or program for it, this release is not optional. And if you’re a skeptic about the instrument — as I confess I generally am — Verdin and this lovely old Cavaillé-Coll may not convert you entirely, but they will make you wonder whether you’ve been missing something.