{"id":17298,"date":"2014-01-28T09:06:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T14:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=17298"},"modified":"2014-01-28T09:06:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-28T14:06:00","slug":"album-review-jean-baptiste-robin-brings-out-the-full-glory-of-the-american-symphonic-pipe-organ","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2014\/01\/28\/album-review-jean-baptiste-robin-brings-out-the-full-glory-of-the-american-symphonic-pipe-organ\/","title":{"rendered":"Album review: Jean-Baptiste Robin brings out the full glory of the American symphonic pipe organ"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>
A side wall and portion of the ceiling at Cincinnati’s Union Terminal, completed in 1933. It houses one of the world’s finest symphonic organs (Carmelo Aquilina photo).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the Nothing Exceeds Like Excess files, pride of place goes to the symphonic pipe organ, a beast consisting of thousands of pipes designed to imitate the sounds of the largest of orchestras. French organist Jean-Baptiste Robin gives us the full glory in a new, made-in-Cincinnati album.<\/p>\n

When the Ohio city’s exuberant Art Deco train station was handed a new life by preservationists as the Cincinnati Museum Center, the building also received a massive, new pipe organ, cobbled together from two instruments built in the 1920s by E.M. Skinner, the United States’ equivalent of Canada’s top builder, Casavant Fr\u00e8res.<\/p>\n

The idea was to recreate an instrument with the fullest, lushest, most Romantically orchestral sound possible — a sort of big, woolly effect that went out of style after World War II.<\/p>\n

Baroque-era music sounds impossibly thick and gooey on an instrument like this, but works from the late-19th and early-20th centuries are perfect for its polished-bronze tonal palette.<\/p>\n

\"organ\"<\/a>Robin, who is now in his late 30s, has gone one step further in The American Symphonic Organ<\/em>, released by Brilliant Classics. We hear his own transcriptions of pieces one might consider inappropriate for a monster pipe organ: Claude Debussy’s La cath\u00e9drale engloutie<\/em>, or Sergei Rachmaninov’s C-sharp minor Pr\u00e9lude<\/em>. But they work — amazingly well — thanks to Robin’s clarity of purpose and restraint in choosing the right sounds (registrations).<\/p>\n

Mahler, a tricky composer to transcribe, comes out magnificently in a moving performance of Urlicht from his Symphony No. 2<\/em>, with the help of mezzo Stacey Rishoi.<\/p>\n

There are two pieces written for pipe organ on this fantastic album: Franz Liszt’s Stentorian Prelude and Fugue on BACH<\/em> and, to close, Robin’s own, exuberantly rhythmic and modern 10 Cercles lointains<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This is big-organ performance at its most expressive and tasteful — yet still packing a sonic punch that raises goosebumps.<\/p>\n

You can find more details on the album here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Here’s a little bit of what great French organists do best, as Robin improvises on a plainsong theme:<\/p>\n