Pierre Labric was 91 years old when Solstice released this reissue, and the label’s devotion to preserving his legacy is touching — if acoustically compromised in ways that cannot quite be wished away. The original masters were lost. What survives here, for the third volume of the complete Pièces de Fantaisie, has been reconstructed from copies and from the LPs themselves, and the sonic damage is audible, variable, occasionally severe. You adjust. You listen past it. Because what Labric does with Vierne is worth the trouble.
Louis Vierne spent most of his adult life nearly blind, physically frail, chronically unlucky in love and in institutional politics, and yet for thirty-seven years he served as titular organist of Notre-Dame de Paris — dying at the console there in 1937, mid-recital, in what amounts to the most operatic exit in the history of the instrument. The Pièces de Fantaisie were composed between 1926 and 1927, when Vierne was in his mid-fifties and at the full height of his command. They are not program music exactly, but they are saturated with private meaning. Twenty-four pieces in four suites — the same number as in the earlier Pièces en style libre, op. 31, a coincidence that seems too tidy to be accidental.
Labric’s recordings of the three suites on this disc — the First (op. 51), Second (op. 53), and Third (op. 54) — date from 1972. More than forty years passed between those sessions and this reissue. That gap is itself a kind of argument about neglect.
What strikes you immediately in the First Suite’s “Prélude” is how Labric refuses to sentimentalize the toccata-like momentum. The harmony lurches and shimmers in that characteristically Viernian way — post-Franckian, vaguely Impressionist but harder-edged, more willing to let a dissonance simply sit there unresolved. Labric understands that Vierne’s world has a specific gravitational pull, and he doesn’t try to normalize it into something more conventionally French. The “Requiem aeternam” — written for Vierne’s brother Édouard, who had died shortly before — is harrowing. A two-note tolling figure anchors the bass while the chromatic main theme accumulates weight above it, the texture thickening almost organically, until the whole thing collapses inward. Labric takes his time. He earns the silence.
The suite ends with a “Marche nuptiale” that has nothing to do with Mendelssohn or Wagner — nothing whatsoever. It is a passacaglia, and as the harmonic language grows progressively more dissonant, the effect is not festive but claustrophobic, almost suffocating by the final bars. Given Vierne’s famously miserable marriage, one reaches for the obvious biographical interpretation, and perhaps that’s too easy. But the music invites it.
The Second Suite’s opening “Lamento” is one of those pieces that seem to compress an entire compositional personality into three or four minutes — the modal inflections, the long-breathed melody that keeps pulling away from its implied tonal center, the registration choices that Labric makes with such apparent naturalness. Then “Feux Follets” arrives and everything changes: mercurial, flickering, the harmonic surface almost iridescent. Impressionist in artistry but not in temperament. There’s something uneasy underneath.
For competing versions, one thinks first of Olivier Latry — whose complete Vierne cycle on BNL has the advantage of modern Notre-Dame acoustics and immaculate sonics — and of Ben van Oosten’s meticulous Dabringhaus und Grimm set. Both are distinguished. But Labric was there first, in every meaningful sense. He played in an era when the Cavaillé-Coll aesthetic was still living tradition rather than historical reconstruction, and that colors everything he does — the way he shapes a phrase, the way he deploys the swell box not as special effect but as natural expressive breath.
The sonic limitations of this reissue are real and they matter. For the Third Suite in particular, the sound opens up enough to let Labric’s interpretive intelligence come through more cleanly, but across all three suites you are hearing music through a scrim. If you already own a modern album of these works, this is supplementary listening — essential context, not a first choice. If you don’t know the Pièces de Fantaisie at all, start somewhere with better sound and come back to Labric afterward.
But do come back. He was a master, and this is evidence.
