When one reviews the Discography section on the Wikipedia page for Dutch organist Ben van Oosten, one sees that it is dominated by French composers, particularly those of the nineteenth century. As his biographical summary observes, van Oosten “gravitated toward the French Romantic Organ school of the 19th century that had its origins in the new symphonic organs of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.” Nevertheless, one significant name is absent from the Discography list, that of César Franck.
That absence was remedied this past September, when Musikproduktion Dabringhaus und Grimm (MDG) released a four-CD collection of van Oosten playing Franck, entitled simply The Organ Works. Note the absence of “complete” in the title. Anyone who consults the Wikipedia list of Franck’s compositions will quickly see that this falls short of a “complete works” release. On the other hand it definitely goes beyond the apex recording of Marie-Claire Alain, which includes the adjective “complete” on the front cover but consists of only two CDs. A more “honest” account would be the TELARC recording of Michael Murray, whose two CDs are listed as constituting the “complete masterworks for organ.”
Van Oosten goes beyond both Alain and Murray by giving an account of music that predates the first piece assigned an opus number, the Opus 16 C major fantasy, the first piece in a set of six composed between 1856 and 1864. This includes two earlier pieces from 1846 and 1854, respectively, as well as selections from a posthumous publication of 30 short pieces. Given that most of Franck’s organ music was created on a moderately lengthy scale, there is much to enjoy in his capacity for brevity; and that is reason enough for van Oosten to offer a collection that is about twice as long as those of his colleagues.
As might be guessed from his personal interests, all of van Oosten’s Franck recordings are made on a Cavaillé-Coll organ, specifically the one in the Church of St. Ouen in Rouen, France. This is a large four-manual pipe organ, which, ironically, was built in the year of Franck’s death, 1890. The instrument has not been altered since then. So, while it is not an instrument that Franck would have played, it provides one of the best current accounts of the sonorities that Cavaillé-Coll had in mind.
The Cavaillé-Coll organ in Rouen (photograph by Gérard Janot, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
Where such massive instruments are concerned, one often has to deal with mediocre organists who are interested in little more than making a mighty noise. (Here in San Francisco we have to deal with this matter when organists come to play the Ruffatti Concert Organ in Davies Symphony Hall.) One of the advantages of listening to van Oosten play those posthumously published short pieces is that one can appreciate that his instrument is as capable of intimacy as it is of inducing “fear and trembling” through its unbridled fortissimo sonorities. Indeed, it is through van Oosten’s meticulous attention to dynamics that one can appreciate that the three chorale pieces that Franck composed near the end of his life in 1890 really are based on chorale themes!
To be fair, listening to these four CDs did not leave me longing for an account of those compositions that were not included; but the collection, taken as a whole, definitely left me with a broader view of Franck’s techniques as both composer and performer, as well as the ways in which his keyboard skills at a piano were complemented by those at an organ console.
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