Vierne: Complete Organ Music

Organ works account for only 17 of Vierne’s 62 opus numbers, and yet no one would now question his status as the organ’s greatest symphonist after Franck and Widor. His six symphonies stand at the pinnacle of the 20th-century literature for the instrument: the six-movement First Symphony with its fugue and celebrated Final (‘my Marseillaise’, as he referred to it); the Second, his masterpiece, with its scintillating scherzo; the Third, the shortest and most concise; the Fourth, whose tortured outer movements are in sharp contrast to the buoyant Menuet and sumptuous Romance; the Fifth, the longest, and in many respects the most elevated; his Sixth and last, the most harmonically advanced and psychologically complex, rising from the depths of despair to ebullience in its rampant Final.

In complement to the symphonies, Vierne composed several suites of pieces ‘in a free style’, as wekk as more impressionistically conceived sets of fantasy pieces. Music specifically designed for the llturgy includes a pair of organ masses – one of them a requiem – and a triptych of meditations. Whether reflective and deeply etched with chromaticism or ebullient and thunderous, all of Vierne’s output for his own instrument is conceived with the sound and tonal variety of Cavaillé-Coll’s organ’s in mind – one of the largest of all being the organ at Notre Dame in Paris, where Vierne occupied the post of titular organist for many decades.

The German-American organist Wolfgang Rübsam has himself been counted among the finest living organists for many decades, internationally known through over a hundred highly acclaimed albums of organ repertoire from the Baroque and Romantic periods including recent Bach recordings on the lute-harpsichord for Brilliant Classics: ‘These lovely performances memorably showcase Rübsam’s sensitive and poetic side’ (Classics Today). Rübsam has chosen an instrument with the full palette of tonal colours required to do justice to Vierne’s unique style, and he invests the music with the improvisational spirit and creative passion which lay behind its original conception.

• Orgelsymphonien Nr. 1-6; Pieces en Style libre op. 31 Heft 1 & 2; Triptyque op. 58; Allegretto op. 1; Communion op. 8; Verset fugue sur "In exitu Israel"; Marche triomphale du Centenaire de Napoleon I op. 46; Messe basse op. 30; Messe basse pour les defunts op. 62; Prelude funebre op. 4; 3 Improvisationen; Pieces de Fantaisie-Suiten Nr. 1-4 (op. 51, 53, 54, 55)

Wolfgang Rübsam (Aristide Cavaille-Coll-Orgel Saint-Francois-de-Sales Lyon, Cavaille-Coll-Orgel Saint-Antoine-des Quinze-Vingts Paris, Skinner-Orgel Rockefeller Memorial Chapel Chicago)