The editors of the ORGELNIEUWS video column are on vacation. A selection of ‘summer guests’ from the organ world do the honors. These weeks they will help you break out of the algorithmic grind of YouTube with their choice from the wonderful world of organ films from home and abroad.
Summer guest editor 11 is…
Peter Ouwerkerk | business leader International Organ Festival Haarlem, editor-in-chief Music & Liturgy, organist and church musician
I’ll start with a confession: I initially had reservations about the overkill of organ videos that have been running along the various timelines since corona. All those colleagues who wanted to throw themselves online if necessary…
Until I got the invitation from ORGELNEWS to list ‘my favourites’. Between you and me: actually I had none. I hardly ever watch organ videos, and if I do watch I usually don’t last long. But now that it ‘had to’, a whole new world opened up for me. And I also need to adjust my initial opinion a bit. Why organists who had to go online ‘if necessary’? There were already plenty of image registrations of every conceivable instrument; it was high time that the organists also presented themselves via the screen! At the same time, I now secretly think: it may well be ready again – there is now a lot of chaff among the wheat. And there really is nothing better than a live concert..
Master Messiaen
An important added value of YouTube is that you can listen to great masters, who have sometimes been dead for decades. That is a reason for me to occasionally look up historical recordings. Composers – and I am now thinking of Messiaen – who have recorded their own compositions often take a great deal of ‘liberty’; after all: no one can tell them they are wrong! Even a massive miss, who simply remains in the recording, therefore seems immediately (literally) authorized. When you listen to some recordings of Messiaen playing his own works, you sometimes wonder whether he would still be admitted to a preparatory course these days. How is it possible that someone who writes down his music in such detail, drops so many stitches in his own performances…
But then I found this video:
Messiaen improvises here in the 1980s, probably around Christmas, on ‘his’ organ in Paris over the melody of Puer natus est. He prefaces each section with a shout of “what’s to come”—loud enough for us to hear it downstairs. And this, although dated of course, still sounds very nice… Sit down for a while; he is fine with it for half an hour. But it is fascinating, where old acquaintances we still know from The Nativity (shepherds, angels, sages), refreshed and reviewed again.
Young and younger talent
After this old but very dead master I would like to show two young organists. Sweelinck’s fantasies are not the most accessible organ fare, certainly not the famous Hexachord fantasy. Matthias Havinga plays it beautifully, on an organ that, thanks to its mood and timbre, shows like no other why this is such a masterpiece. The work is perfect for the Van Covelens organ in Alkmaar.
And now an even younger and very talented generation of organists has emerged. One of the very first participants in the Haarlem Young Talents Class, during the first Haarlem Summer Academy that I organized, was Laurens de Man, then still a teenager. Laurens is now working on a wonderful career, and in 2018, four Organ Festivals later, he received the Sweelinck-Muller Prize in the Bavokerk! It is a true multi-talent; he also convincingly demonstrates his abilities as a pianist. This recording was made on the beautiful choir organ in the Bovenkerk in Kampen, where this music by Langlais sounds surprisingly convincing.
Twee Jannen
In the following video, two special people come together almost symbiotically in two Jans: in my opinion one of the greatest living composers in the Netherlands – Jan Welmers – and one of the Netherlands’ most convincing organists, especially of new music – Jan Hage.
Welmers’ music has a multilayered nature that, the more you listen to his music, the deeper and deeper it reaches. Welmers is modesty itself, and at the same time a rare beautiful and rich person, charming and always with sincere attention to the other. He has recalibrated himself several times in his career as a composer – many know him for his minimal music, such as the well-known Praise the Lord from 1980, but who really knows his equally multicolored later music? It is a rich body of work that deserves to be played much, much more. Preferably live of course, but enjoy a nice registration of Jan Welmers’ Litany (1988, also from the minimal music period) in a recent – face masks for! – masterful performance by Jan Hage in the Dom Church in Utrecht. Kudos to the registrants too!
Ligeti’s colereherrie
A good friend of mine, Franz Danksagmüller, is a truly free-thinking composer, organist and above all improviser. He works in ‘projects’, which he explains in an informative way on his website. Each new project is rooted in the previous one, and in this way he works tirelessly on a fascinatingly coherent oeuvre. A few times I’ve driven up and down one day to his premieres, such as in the new Elbphilharmonie, and sometimes even deeper somewhere in Germany: I really want to hear his new pieces and I’m willing to put in the effort. In this video, he is performing organist in one of the most fascinating organ works of the twentieth century: Volumes (now over sixty years old) by György Ligeti (1923-2006). A job where you may think you can’t do such a bad job after all, but make no mistake! Danksagmüller manages to interpret the work in a breathtaking musical arc of tension. Franz’s idea of projecting the graphic notation onto the church vaults during the work is a genius. Experience it yourself!
Macabre masterpiece
As an encore (as is the performance on this recording), Vincent Dubois sublimely plays Camille Saint-Saëns’ Dance of Death (1875) on his ‘previous’ organ in the cathedral of Soissons (he has been the titular of Notre-Dame in Paris for five years now).
This dance of death is one of the first orchestral pieces that I can remember, and as a toddler this must have been the music that awakened my love for classical music (and years of perhaps less healthy fascination with skeletons, but that is also possible get through the Donald Duck…). And now that I hear the work again, on the instrument that is so central to my life, I am once again convinced that the Dance of Death an underestimated but actually a real masterpiece!
Search on YouTube for organ, organ, orgue and you will enter a wonderful world of beautiful and fun films, from the Netherlands and also a lot from abroad. Ripe and green, concerts, demonstrations, analyzes and interviews. In short: the organ is alive. You would almost forget that you can also go to a concert with your own body instead of watching it all from your lazy chair.
ORGELNEWS will be inviting organists and organ enthusiasts to show their favorite videos in the near future. They are published in the right column of the home page, which has always featured a selection of recent YouTube content. In an editorial he or she explains his choices.
View the selection of all guest editors here.
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