César Franck (1822-1890)
Grande Pièce Symphonique, Op. 17 (1860-62)
(Arrangement for Organ and Orchestra by Zsigmond Szathmáry)
Les Éolides (1876) 
Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937)
La Nuit de Walpurgis, Op. 60 (1887)
Christian Schmitt (organ)
Bamberger Symphoniker/Fabien Gabel
rec. 30 May to 2 June 2023, Joseph-Keilberth-Saal, Konzerthalle Bamburg
CPO 555 632-2 [61]

Originally for organ solo, César Franck’s Grande Pièce Symphonique, Op.17 is the second and largest piece from his Six Pièces pour Grand Orgue and very much characteristic of his mature style in its cyclic form and symphonic scale. The version with orchestra recorded here is the brainchild of organist Christian Schmitt, who asked Hungarian musician Zsigmond Szathmáry to create a concert-hall friendly piece intended to raise awareness of this great music.

Szathmáry sees this as a “pathbreaking work” that paved the way for later organ symphonies by the likes of Widor and Vierne, and as such he has treated the orchestration with great respect and idiomatic empathy for the period and romantic colour of this piece. The organ and orchestra combination is warm and deep, without overly dramatic extremes but filled with imaginative touches. When I first put this on the CD player I had to remind myself that this was originally for organ solo, such is the natural and authentic nature of its sonorities. The organ has a prominent part, but the musical material is divided fairly equally between soloist and orchestra so that this has more of the effect of a ‘symphonic piece with organ’ rather than an organ concerto.

Franck’s Les Éolides is a symphonic poem based on texts by Leconte de Lisle that describe how the daughters of Aeolus, god of the winds, bring nature to life with gentle breezes. The programmatic nature of this music gives it a balletic feel, and its dancing impulse is infused with a lightness of touch in the orchestration in keeping with its airy subject.

Charles-Marie Widor is best known for his organ symphonies, developed to make the most of the magnificent Cavaillé-Coll instruments of his day, and in particular the hundred-stops instrument built in the Église Saint-Sulpice in Paris where Widor would be organist from 1870 to 1933. As a result of Widor’s music for the inauguration of the Cavaillé-Coll organ in Saint-François-Xavier in 1879, he was commissioned by the London Philharmonic Society for a symphonic poem to be based on Goethe’s Faust. La Nuit de Walpurgis had however to compete with the likes of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and other contemporary Goethe inspired works so it only had modest success in its day, but it comes across here as very entertaining and certainly of a different character to Widor’s organ symphonies. The first of three movements is powerfully energetic, the second an atmospheric nocturne with muted strings, the finale a mighty bacchanal that blends playfulness and bombast in equal measure.

This has turned out to be much more of a fun disc that I expected. Not even the most ardent organ afficionado should be offended by Zsigmond Szathmáry’s glorious version of Franck’s  Grande Pièce Symphonique and this is very much the star of the show here, but the Bamburg Symphony Orchestra plays everything very well and recorded balances are very good in an entirely appropriate concert-hall perspective.

Dominy Clements      

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