Dupré: Prelude & Fugue in G minor, Op. 7 No. 3

Christopher Herrick’s enduring Organ Fireworks series on Hyperion is one of the most comprehensive and popular collections of repertoire in existence. For this twelfth volume he turns to the great organ of Haderslev Cathedral in Denmark, and performs a fascinating range of works with his usual triumphal panache.

A number of these pieces have a Danish connection, including two spirited works by Buxtehude who probably grew up in Denmark, and Tre Tonestykker by Niels Wilhelm Gade, a native of Copenhagen who was admired by Mendelssohn.

The third of Dupré’s Trois Préludes et Fugues is among the best-known and most popular of his works, notwithstanding its fearful technical difficulties. The final page, in which the notes hurtle towards the magnificent final cadence, places this among the most memorable of all fugues for organ.

The Czech composer Petr Eben (1929–2007) is represented by his Hommage à Buxtehude.

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.

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