Dupré: Prelude & Fugue in B major, Op. 7 No. 1

Christian Lane is one of America’s most accomplished young organists.

He has been acclaimed for his “driving energy and mature interpretation” The American Organist.

In 2011 he won 1st Prize in the Canadian International Organ Competition.

Dupré and Alain are among the most important 20th century French composers of organ music. Gunther Rost studied with Alain’s sister who was in turn was a pupil of Dupré. Rost performs these works on the Schuke organ in the new church at the Julius-Maximilians University in Würzburg.

Organum Norvegica is a series of records that presents selected organs in Norway. The instruments come from different centuries and have in various ways features of different styles from certain organ cultures and eras. On this recording we present the organ of Skien church. The oldest parts of the organ are from 1894, the same year the church was consecrated. The organ company Olsen & Jørgensen built the first instrument of the church. In 1954 the Jørgensen organ factory made a substantial enlargement, providing the organ with 70 voices. The organ is still one of the largest in Norway.

Terje Winge was born in 1950, and has studied with Ludvig Nielsen in Trondheim, Arild Sandvold in Oslo, Prof. Dr. Jiri Reinberger in Prague and Gaston Litaize in Paris. He made his debut in Oslo in 1970 and has since developed an international career with repertoire ranging from baroque to contemporary music. In addition to his performing career Winge is a sought after pedagogue at the Norwegian Academy of Music.

Louis Vierne was Marcel Dupré’s teacher in improvisation, and the two men admired and respected each other for a long time. However, for the last 15 years of Vierne’s life, they were regarded as rivals, all because of a disagreement over which of them could call himself “The Organist of Notre-Dame”. Vierne wrote the Première Suite towards the end of 1926 and premiered the piece himself on a substantial American tour the following year. He had a strong partiality to chromaticism and dissonances, and the suite contains many typical movement forms from the symphonic organ style. Dupré wrote his Three Preludes and Fugues in 1912, and they are characterised by the fact that he himself already at this time was a technically brilliant organ player. The Preludium and fuge in G Minor became one of Dupré’s most popular organ pieces. In the Second Symphony of 1929 the tonal language is completely different. The tonality is still present, though weakened by the alterations and dissonances in the harmonic progresses.

Cameron Carpenter’s Revolutionary threatens to turn the organ world upside down. Among organists it’s generally accepted that he’s unmatched technically, but this debut CD reveals that his approach to the organ is unlike anything currently in the market. He is such an exciting new artist that the Royal Albert Hall has invited him to make his debut performance in the UK in a solo recital on the 21st October

Cameron Carpenter has been lauded as “the Maverick organist”, “madly original”, and “a superstar of the 21st-century organ”. His debut recording, Revolutionary, showcases an artist who is not only breaking new ground, but who runs a musical gamut that any musician would be extremely hard-pressed to match. There are only four organ works included. Three are major pinnacles of the organ repertoire (Demessieux: Etude in Octaves;Dupré: Prelude and Fugue in B major; and Bach: Now Come, Saviour of the Gentiles) while the fourth is the world premiere recording of Cameron’s suggestive Love Song No. 1 (2008).

The album’s major departures are found in Duke Ellington’s Solitude (wittily combined with Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze); Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz, and Vladimir Horowitz’ Carmen Variations. There are also two of Chopin’s Études in versions so convincing that they might have been organ music; and Cameron’s Evolutionary Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, an outrageous survey of the various instrumental arrangements that made Bach’s work famous.

The album was recorded not on a pipe organ, but on the equally revolutionary Marshall & Ogletree Virtual Pipe Organ at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City – an organ that, rising out of the destruction of Trinity’s pipe organ on September 11, 2001, continues to challenge the status quo of the pipe organ and the artistic possibilities of organ playing in general.

Cameron Carpenter’s Revolutionary threatens to turn the organ world upside down. Among organists it’s generally accepted that he’s unmatched technically, but this debut CD reveals that his approach to the organ is unlike anything currently in the market. He is such an exciting new artist that the Royal Albert Hall has invited him to make his debut performance in the UK in a solo recital on the 21st October

Cameron Carpenter has been lauded as “the Maverick organist”, “madly original”, and “a superstar of the 21st-century organ”. His debut recording, Revolutionary, showcases an artist who is not only breaking new ground, but who runs a musical gamut that any musician would be extremely hard-pressed to match. There are only four organ works included. Three are major pinnacles of the organ repertoire (Demessieux: Etude in Octaves;Dupré: Prelude and Fugue in B major; and Bach: Now Come, Saviour of the Gentiles) while the fourth is the world premiere recording of Cameron’s suggestive Love Song No. 1 (2008).

The album’s major departures are found in Duke Ellington’s Solitude (wittily combined with Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze); Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz, and Vladimir Horowitz’ Carmen Variations. There are also two of Chopin’s Études in versions so convincing that they might have been organ music; and Cameron’s Evolutionary Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, an outrageous survey of the various instrumental arrangements that made Bach’s work famous.

The album was recorded not on a pipe organ, but on the equally revolutionary Marshall & Ogletree Virtual Pipe Organ at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City – an organ that, rising out of the destruction of Trinity’s pipe organ on September 11, 2001, continues to challenge the status quo of the pipe organ and the artistic possibilities of organ playing in general.

Recorded on the organ of St. Boniface Episcopal Church, Sarasota, USA