Peeters: Suite Modale, Op. 43

The Flemish composer-organist Flor Peeters was celebrated in his lifetime with a concert career that took him all around Europe, as well as to America, South Africa and Australia, while remaining the organist of St Rombout’s Cathedral in Mechelen. He was trained as a Catholic church musician and Gregorian chant and the medieval modes remained a lifelong inspiration for his music.

His mature music is often described as neoclassical, and most of it is essentially polyphonic, with an emphasis on simplicity and clarity, transparent linear textures and pungent, incisive tone-colours. Peeters was an almost exact contemporary of Maurice Duruflé, who shared his love of plainsong and the modes. But where Duruflé, with a typically French sensibility, conjured subtle impressionist soundscapes from his modal language, Peeters preferred sharper contours and brighter colours—Van Gogh, perhaps, compared with Duruflé’s Monet.

This disc includes a wide selection of his works for organ, encompassing large-scale concert works as well as some of his many chorale preludes. Peeters’ vast and expertly crafted oeuvre—matched in its size and scope only by a handful of other organ composers – displays great contrast and imagination.

There have been rare CD recordings exclusively dedicated to the organ works by Flor Peeters in recent years. Therefore, our new SACD-release with Peter Van de Velde playing the symphonic Schyven Organ (1891) of Antwerp Cathedral, is dedicated to the grand organ works of this main protagonist of the Belgian organ tradition in the 20th Century. The symphonic Pierre Schyven organ is an ideal instrument for Flor Peeters’s large scale works. During his lifetime the composer even premiered some of his works on this organ.

Peter Van de Velde, the titular organist of the Antwerp cathedral, choose a wise program across the entire compositional works by Flor Peeters, starting with the early Symphonic Fantasy op.13 and ending with the paraphrase of Salve Regina op.123. Between the monumental works he inserts some of the beautiful Chorale preludes from op.68 to complement the program in an excellent manner.