Exeter College Oxford, 7th Nov 2023, 1:10pm
Programme:
Improvisation no. 7 – Camille Saint-Saëns
Prélude Modale
Arabesque – Jean Langlais
Improvisation no. 4 – Camille Saint-Saëns
Improvisation on ‘Aaj Jyotsna Raate’ (Rabindranath Tagore)
based on Raag Behag
Tocade – Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre
Prélude et Fugue sur le nom d’Alain – Maurice Duruflé
Performer’s Notes
Thank you for coming to my organ recital. Yes, I’m using the first person, because today’s a bit of an experiment, so welcome, and thanks again for being part of it.
I’ve decided to write these programme notes as if I were talking to you, partly because I can’t really talk to you from up there in the organ loft but also because I’m not convinced that programme notes delivered as they usually are in that impersonal, dry, academic tone are terribly engaging or effective. I want to provide human context to the dates and names and places by telling you what I personally find interesting about each of these pieces, and why I’ve chosen them to play to you in this chapel, in this programme, today. I would love to receive your feedback on whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to the results of this experiment. Stay for a glass of fizz after the concert if you can – I’d love to meet you.
Improvisation no. 7, Camille Saint-Saëns
The first piece I’m playing for you is one of my favourites. It’s so very joyful, and is written through with the spirit of the dance. It is the final piece in a set of seven so-called ‘Improvisations’ by Camille Saint-Saëns, a wonderful character that most of us know for his humorous Carnival of Animals suite and grand organ symphony (it’s the one the rats sing in the Babe movie).
I have no idea why Saint-Saëns has called this set of pieces ‘Improvisations’, when they are quite clearly composed works. I’m not making up any of what you’re hearing; he wrote it all down. In fact, he wrote these pieces in bed, while recovering from a rather nasty case of bronchitis. I’m in awe of people who can compose in their heads. These pieces are also remarkable for being the first organ pieces Saint-Saëns had written in some 18 years, when he had left the church of the Madeleine in Paris after 20 years of service. His success as a symphonic and operatic composer (and the financial legacy of a colleague) allowed him to do so. He left extremely disillusioned with the church and church music, finding conventional Christianity challenging and resenting the clergy’s interference with musical matters. I can’t help but wonder the extent to which his homosexuality contributed to this disillusionment. We have these pieces thanks to a friend and former student of Saint-Saëns who encouraged him to write something for the organ while he was laid up, and subsequently to perform them publicly when he recovered, which he did in March 1917.
I have opened the recital with the piece today not only because I enjoy playing it, but because I find that in recent years I identify all too closely with Saint-Saëns’ sentiments about the church and church music As a queer person of South Asian heritage, despite the radical moments of inclusion I have found with Christian friends and colleagues, I have too often felt like the career path associated with the organ was not welcoming of people like me, and that in some ways my years of dedication to the instrument had been a waste. I am astounded, to be honest, that so many excellent colleagues regard me as ‘an organist’. However I feel about this label, and the various parts of it that I struggle to identify with, I cannot deny that playing the organ gives me great joy. As Saint-Saëns declared how much he enjoyed playing these pieces on his recovery to health, so too I share this piece as a shout of reclamation. I am an organist, and suppose I always will be.
Prélude Modale & Arabesque, Jean Langlais
Jean Langlais was a virtuosic blind composer, who wrote a bunch of wacky stuff. He preferred modernist composition but in the ancient church modes, and the result is sometimes within the realms of familiar sonorities, and at others stretches the ear to the limits of tonality. I hesitated to programme the first of these two pieces, because over the years I’ve been conditioned to value ‘difficult’ pieces more than those that aren’t that technically challenging. However, I find this piece so soothing; I breathe more deeply when I play it. I hope that you will allow the sound to surround you, to weigh down your eyelids, and bring you closer to your breath for a few precious minutes.
The Arabesque is a charming little piece in two parts, a swooping melody at the start and the end, and a fluttering one in the middle that reminds me of the way a butterfly flits through the sky. It could be named for the ballet manoeuvre, but I think it’s more likely to be named after the intricacy of the Islamic style of line drawing in visual art, which also influenced a 20th century term for music with a highly decorated melody. I don’t think that there’s an orientalist design beneath Langlais’ Arabesque; rather I think this is a reminder that cultural exchange and appreciation does have a long history, and one that comes more clearly into view when we move aside works based in appropriation to make space for everything else.
Improvisation no. 4 – Saint-Saëns
This piece is from the middle of the same set I played to you from earlier. I enjoy the playfulness of the broken chords becoming chromatic and sliding around the keys, before bouncing along again, and coming to a steady close.
Improvisation on ‘Aaj Jyotsna Raate’, after Rabindranath Tagore
based on Raag Behag
Rabindranath Tagore was a revolutionary thinker, poet, playwright, composer, and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Widely admired in the West in his time, he was pivotal in the development of a modern Bengali cultural identity, and a pioneer in India’s freedom movement. Amongst his enormous oeuvre he wrote some 2200 songs, some based on folk melodies from around the world, others with original forms derived from Hindustani Classical Ragas. Aaj Jyotsna Raate speaks in the voice of one who stays at home, waiting, while everyone else goes out to celebrate the coming of spring in the forest. Written just after the death of his infant son, Tagore uses the inherent ambiguity of the Bengali language to create a text that offers kaleidoscopically a story of waiting for a lover, of mourning the absence of a child who will never come home, and of the faithful heart abiding in anticipation of the presence of the divine.
Being British, but having a culture quite different to most of my Western Classical colleagues, I did not grow up with the harmonic landscape or educational instruction that informs most organ improvisation. It is an area in which I have always felt inadequate, sometimes because I was expressly made to by those who should have encouraged me. I am grateful to Dr Robin Harrison for reminding me that, as one trained in the fundamentals of the Indian Classical tradition, improvisation is deeply my own, and I may practise it in whatever form I like.
Raag Behag is a beautiful raga for the second quarter of the night, between 9pm to midnight, and emerged in the 15th century. It features both the flattened and sharpened 4th degree, and rests predominantly on the third and seventh tones, creating a tender sense of longing and trailing sonorities.
Tocade -Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre
Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was the daughter of a harpsichord maker, a child prodigy who performed for King Louis XIV aged 5, and eventually became one of the stars amongst his court musicians at Versailles. Jacquet de la Guerre wrote many keyboard and string works dedicated to the Sun King, and was one of the most celebrated composers of her time. She retired from Versailles on her marriage to an organist, after which time she enjoyed a life of teaching, composing, and performing around the city of Paris.
This piece comes from her first book of Piéces de Clavecin, and was intended for performance on the harpsichord. In the long tradition of musicians adapting works of composers they admire for the organ, I offer an only slightly adapted form to you today.
Prélude et Fugue sur le Nom d’Alain
I began learning this piece as an organ scholar at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. I was in awe of its enormity, and initially too scared to perform it in public. I played it for the first time in a recital this year, and am delighted by how the instrument here at Exeter College allows me to bring out the rich colours and textures of the piece.
The piece is written in memory of the organist Jéhan Alain, and Duruflé has extended the musical ‘alphabet’ (A-G) to allow him to write the name ALAIN, which appears as the motif in the prelude, the basis of the fugue theme, and in every possible inversion, retrograde motion, and other mutation elsewhere. The melody of Alain’s popular ‘Litanies’ also inspires the shape of the lines, appearing in direct quotation towards the end of the Prélude.
This piece takes me through a huge range of emotions, from stillness to a transcendent ecstasy, from anxiety to a deep sense of peace. I end with it because I am yet to find any piece that can follow from the grand finale of this 12-minute epic in sound.
Please join us after the recital for a drinks reception.
Thank you for joining us today. Please do get in touch with Anita via the contact form, or on social media, to let her know what you thought of today’s recital.
Twitter: @dattabari
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