Organ recital featuring Olivier Latry
Event URL 2013-10-12
Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness, San Francisco, CA
3:00 PM, Saturday, October 12, 2013

[3:00 PM lights down, go! Announce]

J.S. Bach (1685-1750): Prelude and Fugue in E minor (“Cathedral”), BWV 533, (ca. 1705) (ca. 15 minutes)

1. Prelude
2. Fugue
   SFS Program Notes
   [work ends 3:16 PM]

César-Auguste-Guillaume-Hubert Franck (1822-1890): Cantabile, M. 36, from Trois Pi'eces pour le grand orgue (Three Pieces for Organ), M. 35-37, (1878) (ca. 6 minutes)

1. Cantabile
   SFS Program Notes
   [work ends 3:23 PM]

Louis Victor Jules Vierne (1870-1937): Carillon de Westminster, from 24 Pièces de fantaisie: Troisième Suite, Op. 54, No. 6 (1927)

1. Carillon de Westminster
   SFS Program Notes
   [work ends 3:30 PM]

Louis Victor Jules Vierne (1870-1937): Feux follets (“Will o' the Wisp”), from 24 Pièces de fantaisie: Deuxième Suite, Op. 53, No. 4 (1926)

1. Feux follets
   SFS Program Notes
   [work ends 3:35 PM]

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) (arr. Edwin Henry Lemare (1866-1934)): Danse macabre, Op. 40 (1874/1919) (ca. 8 minutes)

1. Danse macabre, for solo Organ
   SFS Program Notes
   [work ends 3:43 PM]

[4:01 go!]

Thierry Escaich (b.1965): Évocation I, from Deux Évocations, (1996)

1. Évocation I
   SFS Program Notes
   [work ends 4:12 PM]

Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986): Sicilienne from Suite pour orgue, Op. 5, (1932) (ca. 6 minutes)

1. Sicilienne
   SFS Program Notes
   [work ends 4:19 PM]

Thierry Escaich (b.1965): Évocation II, from Deux Évocations, (1996) (ca. 6 minutes)

1. Évocation II
   SFS Program Notes
   [work ends 4:25 PM]

Olivier Latry: Improvisation on San Francisco, Open Your Golden Gate

1. Theme
2. Improvisation
   SFS Program Notes
   [work ends 4:34 PM]

• Olivier Latry: organ

This morning's martial arts tournament wrapped up early, so I hustled over to W.O. BART and on to Civic Center without much worry about the time. Nice to be unconstrained in that way! It was bright and sunny in the park, but with a crisp breeze blowing off the huge fog bank lurking up on the hill to the west. The Dew Tour sprawled out across Grove and Hayes, filling up most of the park with a skate and BMX course for the competition, food booths, equipment vendors, promotional pop-ups and assorted event support tables. What with the healthy crowd, I opted to investigate only the South side of the event…plenty enough to get a good sense for the event. Lots of good crowd-focused options for folks disinclined to sit and spectate in the grandstands!

Walking on down Grove, I noticed Rob Joyce at work in the community garden, and stopped for a minute to chat and admire his work. At this point in the season, it's definitely trending towards lush, wild and slightly overgrown. “Rain's coming soon,” Rob said with a smile. Yup. Seasons change most everywhere; here the switch is generally from dry to rainy. I'm looking forward to a sprinkle or ten myself, but hoping to be spared from anything like the deluge that hit the CO Rockies a few weeks back.

So anyway, it's farewell to Rob and on to Davies Hall. Still running a little early, but that just gives me time to write these paragraphs and review today's program notes. And then I look up to see that the hall has filled up around me. Must be time for the show!

And my reason for posting these setlists, the show, you must be wondering, “how was it?” if you're here reading. Well, it was excellent. Latry is a very good performer, if not nearly as flashy as Cameron Carpenter. Getting started with Bach is almost always a good idea. I love the way that Bach manages to combine the contrasting elements of predictability and surprise in his works. I would have been pleased to hear more Bach, but the program moved on forward to works of the more recent past.

Of the rest of Set One, I preferred Vierne's two shorts to Saint-Saens' longer one, mainly because it's hard for me to hear the Devil's fiddle in this arrangement of the Danse Macabre. Blame here rests either on my lack of imagination – an inability to transfer the sound of trilling pipes to trilling strings – or an inflexibility on my part to permit transposition of timbre rather than the part of the Ruffle organ to create that sound.

Set Two was distinctly modern, with the pair of Escaich pieces particularly seeming to look forward and outward from tradition rather than observing any homage to the past. Similarly, Latry's deconstruction

Stephen Smoliar offers his opinion on the show at the Examiner website.

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