Franck, Cesar Auguste

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares179 Views

    Review: For Franck’s 200th, an Organist Pays Grand Tribute

    by

    Paul Jacobs has completed his survey of the major solo organ works of César Franck, whose birthday year is passing with scattered observances.It has not been the happiest 200th birthday year for César Franck. “What Happened to One of Classical Music’s Most Popular Pieces?” this newspaper asked a few months ago — the headline to an account of how Franck’s Symphony in D minor, once a standard, largely vanished from concert programs.That symphony has not been widely revived even for this anniversary year, and Franck’s most often heard piece is probably his lush, musing Violin Sonata. But he spent decades at the organ console of Ste.-Clotilde in Paris and as a professor of that instrument at the Paris Conservatory; in his lifetime, he was best known as an organist and a teacher.So it is fitting that among the most prominent 2022 celebrations — indeed, one of the few 2022 celebrations — has come from Paul Jacobs, one of the finest organists and teachers of our day. Jacobs played six of Franck’s pieces at a concert in March, and on Tuesday another six, completing the set of this composer’s 12 major organ works.Both recitals took place at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Midtown Manhattan, known informally as “Smoky Mary’s” for what is said to be lingering hints of incense in the air. Its organ, built by the Aeolian-Skinner company, was installed in 1932 and has been lovingly kept since then; it is one of the major instruments of New York, capable of filling a space whose reverberation gives music both clarity and room to breathe.Paul Jacobs, one of the finest organists and teachers of our day.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn March, Jacobs played the three pieces Franck wrote in the late 1870s, and the three sprawling, pensive chorales that were the great product of 1890, the year he died. The 75-minute, intermissionless program on Tuesday pushed further back in time, to the “Six Pièces pour Grand Orgue” that were written soon after Franck took up his position at Ste.-Clotilde, in 1858, and published in 1868.These are Romantic outpourings, their structures grand, if improvisatory in feel. Yet Jacobs kept them from turning turgid — his tempos flowing while conveying the weight and depth of the music. He began the “Fantaisie” with mysterious, almost meterless delicacy, like the prelude to “Parsifal”; in the “Pastorale,” his palette extended to spicy burnt umber and milky pale blue, mellow oboe and sweetly piercing flute.Jacobs’s textures were also beautifully varied in the “Prière,” the trumpet mellowed by the vast space without losing its focus; the “Prélude, Fugue et Variation” was a wistful nocturne, sensitively controlled and never overblown. The “Final” moved from roaring lows to shimmering highs, its dotted-rhythm motif bounding before its pile-on conclusion.Jacobs played the “Final” third. His even apter finale to the concert was the “Grand Pièce Symphonique,” which lasts nearly half an hour and influenced a generation of large-scale solo organ works. Here it was clear in its hovering veils of sound, its quietly lyrical serenity and its toccata flurries, before a steady, triumphal ending.If Franck is to have such scattered tributes this year, at least Jacobs has done him justice.Paul JacobsPerformed on Tuesday at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Manhattan. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      What Happened to One of Classical Music’s Most Popular Pieces?

      by

      César Franck’s only symphony was a pillar of the repertory for decades. But it’s now a rarity.Whatever Leopold Stokowski’s thirst for celebrity, he was not known for caving to audience pressure. During his long tenure conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, from 1912 to 1938, Stokowski gave the American premieres of scores as challenging as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and Berg’s “Wozzeck,” with little concern for box office.But near the end of most of his seasons in charge, this great showman did bow to mass taste. Philadelphia’s subscribers were invited to vote for their favorite works, with the promise that Stokowski would lead the winners on a closing “request program.”For years, the victor was Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique,” a sorrowful symphony so popular that other orchestras had been, the critic Lawrence Gilman wrote in 1925, “so sure of the outcome of similar voting contests that they sent their programs to press before the date of the election.”But at the end of the 1923-24 season, a challenger dealt the Tchaikovsky a knockout blow: César Franck’s Symphony in D minor.“Is it inflating the symphony of the lovable Belgian,” Gilman wondered in the New York Herald Tribune, “to rank it above the dolorous swan song of Tchaikovsky?”Probably, Gilman concluded. But the Franck, which the composer completed in 1888, would not be downed.Stokowski leading the openingPhiladelphia Orchestra, 1927 (Music & Arts)“What is there in the texture of the music itself to explain its popularity?” Gilman pondered, reporting another landslide in 1929, when the Franck beat Beethoven’s Fifth, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth and Sixth, and Brahms’s First. In 1924, Gilman had scorned “the more than occasional triteness and inferiority of its musical expression,” and though he admitted that it had an “unforgettably noble distinction of contour and gesture,” it was in his view no match for the greats.Perhaps, Gilman wrote, “the public taste is itself part of the problem.” Yet, he added, “the interest and the oddity of the verdict remain.”Quiet, sincere and more famous in his lifetime as an organist and teacher than as a composer, Franck celebrates the bicentenary of his birth this year. But it’s unlikely that American orchestras will bring to the celebration the fervor with which they once performed his sole symphony. In one of the stranger stories in the history of the canon, the work — which from the 1920s until the ’60s was such a hit that the New York Philharmonic thought it a solid bet to fill Lewisohn Stadium on a hot summer’s night — is now all but absent from concert halls.Decline of a Once-Popular SymphonyPremiered in 1889, Franck’s Symphony in D Minor surged in popularity during Germany’s World War I occupation of the composer’s native Belgium. But interest has tapered off in the last 50 years. More