I went for my morning walk today, and took along the BBC broadcast of Olivier Latry’s BBC Proms all-Bach organ recital from Royal Albert Hall for company. I got rather more than I was expecting: from weird technical miscues by the production folks; to a fine organ recital that tamed the Royal Albert Hall’s very large English Romantic organ (Henry “Father” Willis) for Baroque repertoire; then picked up steam to climax in a blaze of modern organ improvisation glory. I hardly noticed the walk.
If you have access to the broadcast replay, do make a point of listening, it is likely to stand as a highlight of this year’s Proms. But here and now, I’ve been inspired by Latry’s accomplishment to hand today’s Daily Playlist slot over to him. I can’t offer a playback from BBC Radio 3 here, but let’s see what else we can conjure up.
The core concept of today’s concert was Bach in transcription. Transcriptions by Latry’s French organ forebears including Widor, Gigout, Duruflé and Messerer, as well as by Bach himself. The only J.S. Bach organ original was the ever-familiar Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Here is Olivier Latry improvising at the end of service at Notre-Dame in 2011, video shot in the organ loft with friends and family attending.
Latry has been a titular organist of Notre-Dame since 1985, so you can be sure he is well practised at adapting Baroque repertoire to a fundamentally unsuitable instrument. His Bach is mainstream modern. He doesn’t really go for historically-informed asceticism, no eccentric tempos, no mannered detaching of every other note. Finely judged is the Latry ticket. His registrations and imaginative deployment of timbres in unusually colorful juxtapositions tell another story, though. Latry delights in bringing out the natural best qualities of whatever instrument he plays, regardless the repertoire.
Here is Latry’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor BWV 565, as recorded in 2019 for his album Bach to the Future (La Dolce Volta). This time we see him at the impressive performance console of Notre-Dame’s Cavaillé-Coll organ (another Romantic monster)… just before the great fire that damaged that version of the instrument.
This performance and the whole album from 2019 has been re-mastered and re-issued in fairly spectacular Dolby Atmos spatial audio, re-titled Bach to Notre Dame, in a bit of tricky rebranding to piggyback on the remarkable Notre-Dame reconstruction project.
At Royal Albert Hall this morning, Latry’s Toccata and Fugue sounded very similar to his 2019 recording: classic, no surprises, a well articulated and architected performance in the best manner, and a fitting conclusion…. but wait! It was not the conclusion: the scheduled program also included Olivier Latry: Improvisation on B-A-C-H. And every one “in the know” – ie. pretty much the whole audience in Royal Albert Hall – was eagerly anticipating this finale.
Latry is renowned as among the greatest of organ improvisers of our day. He did not disappoint! He began by slowly playing the single notes: B flat, A, C, B natural, for (German naming) BACH. Long pause to gather thoughts: and then an absolute wonder of beautiful and frankly exciting musical outpouring. Latry built his improvisation starting with an atmospheric and modern sounding meditation on the given notes, gradually building momentum and harmonic complexity, then counter melodies and chordal elaborations. I was surprised that kept steadfast contact with the shape of the theme throughout this introduction and development.
After developing that musical narrative for about 7 or 8 minutes, he began a crescendo that I expect to be thinking about for quite a while. The grand swell pedal crescendo is a staple gesture of the romantic organ in its full glory, but this was something special! It began in the quietest division of the organ with four-to-a-bar chords that kept finding new angles on the B-A-C-H interval shape. Just as we got used to that, he interrupted the gradually swelling march of chordal wizardry to unleash a torrent of flittering, agile passagework. Continual crescendo… and then he jammed both ideas together in an enormous sustained outburst that finally allowed the Willis organ to roar to its fullest grand climax. The roar of the Proms audience afterwards was among the loudest we are likely to hear this season.
Again, I urge you to listen for yourself, if you can find a source for the BBC re-broadcast (easy if you are in the UK, not so easy elsewhere). Meanwhile, here’s another Latry improvisation to tide you over.
And here’s another, more recent Latry performance to complete the playlist:
