Daquin: Nouveau Livre de Noëls – Christian Mouyen

Somewhere in the back of every organist’s mind is the fantasy of Christmas in Paris around 1730, candles guttering, the congregation half-drunk on cold air and incense, and some virtuoso up in the loft spinning out variations on carols everybody in the pews already knew by heart. Louis-Claude Daquin lived that fantasy for real. He was, by every contemporary account, an absurdly gifted child — playing for Louis XIV at age six, dazzling Rameau himself — and by the time he assembled his Nouveau Livre de Noëls around 1740, dedicating it to the Comte d’Eu, he had spent decades turning improvisation into a kind of civic spectacle. People came to hear him make things up. That he wrote any of it down at all is faintly miraculous.

This new disc — recorded in November 1997 in the Abbatiale Sainte-Croix in Bordeaux — gives us all twelve noëls, and gives them on an instrument that has every right to share the marquee: the great Dom Bedos organ, restored in the 1970s using the builder’s own treatise, L’Art du facteur d’orgues, as a kind of divine blueprint. That’s an unusual luxury for scholars and listeners alike. Most historic French organs surviving from the ancien régime carry the scars of nineteenth-century “improvement” or wartime neglect or both. This one was rebuilt from a book its own maker wrote. The circularity is delicious — theory begetting practice begetting theory again — and the results, five manuals deep with a 32’ bourdon growling under everything, sound both scholarly and startlingly alive.

Christian Mouyen plays it like someone who has spent real time listening to the building breathe.

The noëls themselves are wildly various — that’s rather the point. Daquin was not writing a unified cycle so much as a compendium of registrational possibilities, a demonstration album for the instrument’s colors disguised as devotional music. No. 3, “Noël en musette, en dialogue et en duo,” rocks along on a drone that could pass for a village bagpiper wandered in from the fields. No. 9, on the flutes alone, is pure hushed intimacy — no tremblant, no theatrics, just breath moving through wood. And then there’s the Swiss noël that closes the set, marked grand jeu et duo, which Mouyen lets rip with real abandon: reeds blazing, the plein jeu mixture work bright and slightly acidic in that specifically French way that no German or English organ can quite replicate.

It’s in the dotted rhythms and triplet figures — the notation inégale territory where French Baroque performance practice lives or dies — that this release earns its keep. Mouyen doesn’t over-schematize the inequality; he lets it swing, lets it breathe unevenly the way a good gigue does, without turning it into a metronome exercise. No. 6 and No. 12 are where this really pays off. There’s a swagger to the phrasing, a sense that the rhythm is dancing rather than marching, and it’s exactly what separates a interpretation that understands the idiom from one that merely respects it.

I’ll admit a soft spot for the older Marie-Claire Alain recordings of this repertoire — cleaner-lined, perhaps a touch more didactic, made on instruments less flamboyantly colored than this Dom Bedos organ. And André Isoir’s version has its partisans too, rightly so. But Mouyen’s account has something those lack: a sense of place. You can hear the stone. You can hear the room deciding how long a chord gets to live before it dies away into the nave.

Minor complaints, and they are minor: some of the quieter cornet registrations occasionally blur in the resonant acoustic, the tierce en taille passages losing a hair of their vocal clarity to the building’s generous decay. A tighter, drier engineering choice might have sharpened detail at the cost of atmosphere. I’ll take the atmosphere.

This is a disc for anyone curious not just about Daquin but about what an entire French organ-building philosophy sounded like before it got improved into oblivion. Essential listening, and not only for organ people — though they’ll want it most.