Houlihan’s Vierne Festival Recital

Organist Louis Vierne (courtesy of Christopher Houlihan)

This past week organist Christopher Houlihan honored the 150th anniversary of the birth of composer Louis Vierne with a four-day Vierne at 150 festival. The event concluded this past Thursday evening, when Houlihan performed a one-hour recital of Vierne’s organ compositions on the pipe organ at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. The entire festival was Webcast, including Houlihan’s recital, which may now be revisited through a YouTube Web page.

Those who used to read my articles for Examiner.com may recall that, in 2012, Houlihan commemorated the 75th anniversary of Vierne’s death with a six-city concert tour. In each of those cities he played Vierne’s six “symphonies” for solo organ over the course of two concerts. I used scare quotes to suggest that these six multi-movement compositions have little to do with “symphonic form.” They could just as easily have been called suites. However, Vierne used this latter noun to denote the groupings of compositions he called collectively Pièces de Fantasie (fantasy pieces). Each of four groups consisted of six of these pieces, many of which were given descriptive titles.

Houlihan’s Hartford program began with four of these fantasy pieces serving as an overture of sorts to the Opus 32 (fourth) organ symphony in G minor. He began with the last of the six pieces in the Opus 54 (third) suite, “Carilon de Westminster,” an ornate fantasia on the four pitches known familiarly as the “Westminster Chimes.” This was followed by the fourth piece in the Opus 55 (fourth) suite, “Naïades,” and concluded with the last two pieces in the Opus 53 (second) suite, “Clair de lune,” and “Toccata.”

For the most part the video work provided excellent views of Houlihan at the organ console. One could not appreciate the full extent of coordination of keyboard technique, pedal work, stop selection, and dynamics modulated by the swell pedals from the “usual audience vantage point” in a church or concert hall. Furthermore, by observing the richness of that technique, the ear was more readily guided to the substance of the thematic material and the rhetorical devices through which Houlihan conveyed that material. The same can be said of the video account of his approach to the more abstract Opus 32 symphony.

Taken as a whole, what was most interesting was the extent to which both the performance and the video account provided a useful introduction to Vierne’s techniques as a composer. It was particularly engaging to observer Houlihan execute ornate arpeggios on one keyboard with one hand, while the other hand unfolded a cantus firmus on another keyboard. The pedals then provided a bass line, which would often extend into a more ornate melodic line. The viewer was thus provided with a rich experience of both Vierne’s lexicon and the syntax through which his “words” were assembled into “sentences.” The experience was not that different from viewing a video account of a full orchestra in which the camera work follows both thematic and instrumental progressions.

If there was any shortcoming, it was that even the best audio system still cannot do justice to the physical experience created by all of those ranks of organ pipes; but it was still impressive how much of the experience was conveyed, given the limitations of bandwidth.