Escaich, Faure, Gounod, and Messiaen
Conductor’s Notes
This afternoon’s program recapitulates the glorious French tradition of cathedral music, evoking both its historical splendor and its current flourishing. We begin with Cantique de Jean Racine (1865) by Gabriel Fauré, written for a competition when Fauré was still a student at the École Niedermeyer in Paris. The composer’s prizewinning work sets verse by 17th -century French playwright Jean Racine, based on a Latin hymn. Faure’s unique gift for melody and his distinctively French take on long-lined, lushly harmonized Romanticism are in evidence from the first alluring phrase.
Next up: the U.S. premiere of prominent French composer Thierry Escaich’s Mess Romane. Escaich (born in 1965) is an organist-composer in the French tradition of Franck, Louis Vierne, and Messiaen. The Messe Romane premiered four years ago in the magnificent Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Drawing on musical practices associated with Notre Dame since the Middle Ages, Escaich explores chant-based choral textures of call and response that make stunningly effective use of the expressive musical possibilities that inhere in a resonant acoustic. Escaich’s exhilarating harmony, transparent yet abounding with savory dissonance, shows his rightful claim to the mantle of Messiaen and Duruflé.
After intermission, organist Bálint Karosi offers the dazzling organ solo Dieu parmi nous (1935) by Olivier Messiaen. This excerpt from the longer cycle La Nativité du Seigneur is both deeply spiritual and cherished all over the world as a showpiece for organ virtuosos. Not for nothing do we refer to “pulling out all the stops.”
The program concludes with Charles Gounod’s stirring Requiem, which was to be his last work. He had written it for his grandson, but he himself died of a stroke just a few days after completing it, in 1893. The music’s language is direct, denuded, even craggy, with tragic grandeur and monumental power. A listener readily intuits the composer’s inner pressure and feelings of loss and urgency. With this performance, the chorus pays homage to Gounod’s 200th birthday.
© Mark Shapiro, 2018