Franckaphilia

That was the title of a faculty recital I attended on a recent evening.

César Franck

Fully, it was “Franckaphilia: The Complete Organ Works of César Franck – Part I: From Palace to Paradise,” performed by Janette Fishell, IU Jacobs School of Music Organ Department Chair. She performed in Auer Hall on the magnificent and relatively new (dedicated in 2010) Fisk organ, named the Maidee H. and Jackson A. Seward Organ. A Part II recital has been scheduled for January 2017.

Born in Liège, in what is now Belgium, César Franck (1822 – 1890) spent his adult life in Paris working as a pianist, organist, and composer. His work is typical of late Romantic musical compositions, but very enjoyable even if one isn’t predisposed to the Romantic period. This recital was composed of two sections. The first was “Trois pièces: No. 1 Fantaisie in A Major, No. 2 Cantabile, No. 3 Pièce héroïque,” followed, after a brief pause, by “Trois chorals: No. 1 in E Major, No. 2 in B Minor, No. 3 in A Minor.” Of all of repertoire, my favorite, and generally a crowd-pleaser, was the truly heroic, even bombastic, “Pièce héroïque.”

Fisk Organ in Auer Hall
IU Jacobs School of Music

I have been told that the Auer Hall organ is particularly well suited to Romantic music. I wouldn’t know. I have enjoyed a number of recitals and concerts there, including the evening previous to this concert, when a young Mexican harpist of our acquaintance played his senior recital there. It’s a wonderful, contemporary, mid-size (400-seat) concert hall—a fine facility in a very fine school of music.

Franck himself was associated with a fine organ. In 1858 he became the organist at Sainte-Clotilde, a basilica church on the Rue Las Cases in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris, and kept that position for the rest of his life. A year later the church acquired its famous Aristide Cavaillé-Coll organ, played by Franck and a number of later well-known composers. Franck subsequently became a French national and in 1872 was appointed to a professorship at the Paris Conservatoire.

Who knows whether I’ll manage to take in Part II of Franckaphilia, but if it happens I’m sure it will be equally enjoyable.

Rubbing Musical Elbows

My musical talent, as the saying goes, would fit into a thimble with room left over for three raisins and a caraway seed. Consequently, I am in awe of those who make music, whether as composers or performers. In Bloomington, Indiana, where we have the renowned Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, you can’t throw a paper airplane without hitting an accomplished musician.

This means that ordinary folk like me get to rub elbows with some fascinating and accomplished individuals, whether it’s running into (not literally, thankfully) jazz and classical composer, conductor, and teacher David Baker on the jogging track at the local YMCA, being greeted at a reception by opera soprano Sylvia McNair, sharing lemonade and munchies with young harpists in the home of Susann McDonald, founder of the USA International Harp Competition, or enjoying a pitch-in dinner with music scholar and authority on the American composer Charles Ives, Peter Burkholder—and those are just four of the faculty. I did a double-take not long ago when I noticed that the keyboardist in a local rock cover band, playing a pizza joint-cum-music club that evening, was a well-known classical organist and IU professor that I’d last seen performing Bach in a much different setting.

But it’s the students that really awe me. The tenor or the soprano who’s soloing in our church choir not unusually can also be spotted in an opera on campus or a musical play somewhere in town, or may well be headlining at a local jazz club.

A recent acquaintance has been Texu Kim, an unassuming graduate student from Seoul, Korea. Tex, as he’s called, is doing doctoral studies in music composition at the Jacobs School. He’s so modest and unassuming that it took me several conversations to realize that this young composer is already amazingly accomplished. This past academic year alone he has flown to Paris and Frankfurt for premieres of his compositions.

In Paris this past January, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, directed by Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki, performed his “Toccata Inquieta,” a work for solo harpsichord and ensemble. The harpsichordist was Dimitri Vassilakis. The concert also was broadcast in Germany on Deutschlandradio Kultur.

In an interview in Paris Tex cited influences from music played in Korean Christian churches, jazz, and rock, in addition to classical music. Tex studied chemistry before turning to music composition, and so he also tends to use mathematical and scientific principles as tools for musical composition.

In March the Paris premiere was followed by another in Frankfurt. This time the work was “Sketches for Contredanse,” with Peter Rundel directing the Ensemble Modern. The composition was included in a program with several other premieres in the Mozart Hall of the Alte Oper, or Old Opera (photo). Founded in 1980, the Ensemble Modern is one of the world’s leading ensembles of Contemporary Music. Currently, the ensemble is composed of musicians from Argentina, Bulgaria, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Poland, and Switzerland.

For someone who’s “just” a grad student, Tex is well on his professional career path and doing splendidly.

Texu Kim is an outstanding example, but in Bloomington he’s also in good company. There aren’t many Midwest college towns in which the guy waiting on your table at a local restaurant could well be singing at the Met next year. 

Harp Competition Really About People

For the past two weeks Bloomington, Indiana, specifically Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, was the center of the harp world, as the eighth USA International Harp Competition unfolded. A triennial event, this year USAIHC attracted 39 competitors from around the globe, all of them young women between the ages of sixteen and thirty-two.

My partner and I are not harp cognoscenti, but we have always enjoyed getting acquainted and interacting with international students. Thus we volunteered to host a harpist, which is how nineteen-year-old Agné Keblyté (photo) from Lithuania ended up staying with us. What a delight she was! Indeed, the homestay experience was universally fun and rewarding for hosts and guests alike.

For us, the competition wasn’t the true centerpiece of the two weeks. Rather, it was the people themselves: the music school officials, from deans and faculty stars to student harp movers, who worked tirelessly to pull off this major international event; the harpists, performing through successive stages of elimination (Agné got to Stage 2); the host families, making sure their harpists not only got to the competition venues relaxed and on time but also had a chance to see something of the real Bloomington; and the guest performers, both young and experienced, who entertained our community brilliantly.

Competition on this level draws only the best, so the notion of “winners” and “losers” does not apply. All of the harpists were accomplished and performed beautifully. I gained an appreciation of the harp as a solo instrument, whereas previously I had seen it only as an instrument somewhere back in the mass of the symphony orchestra. In particular, a guest recital by the 2004 gold medal laureate, Emmanuel Ceysson, brought this home. Ceysson, still under age thirty, took up his current position as principal harp of the Paris Opera Orchestra not long after winning the USAIHC prize. And what a marvel he was to watch—and hear—in recital!

Another highlight was a “stars of tomorrow” recital given by five harpists, all national junior champions under the age of sixteen. Later, seeing them frolicking with the harp competitors at a pool party reminded us that these incredibly talented young people are, underneath the formal wear and beyond those elegant instruments, just kids—kids who like splashing one another in the swimming pool, chowing down on hotdogs and chips, and laughing and joking with one another in half a dozen languages.

In the end it always comes down to people.

Celebrating Mendelssohn and the Organ

Shortly after noon today I joined a scattering of devotees to enjoy a brief recital by four organ students from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. The venue was the 3,200-seat Indiana University Auditorium; the instrument, a massive 4,543-pipe organ built in 1889. Originally called the Roosevelt organ for builder Hilborne L. Roosevelt, it served the Auditorium Theater in Chicago until the 1940s, when it was sold to William H. Barnes of Evanston, Illinois. Barnes donated it to IU, where it was installed in the Auditorium in 1944.

Among the composers whose works were performed during the recital, the name Felix Mendelssohn stood out — for good reason. This year is the 200th anniversary year of the composer.

Felix Mendelssohn, as he is known in English-speaking countries, was born February 3, 1809, in Hamburg, Germany. His full name was Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Though recognized as a prodigy, his parents did not capitalize on his talent but allowed him to develop. He was well received as a composer, conductor, and soloist; and his fame spread across Europe during the Romantic Era.

His tastes in music were rather conservative. In fact, he founded a conservatory at Leipzig, which became a bastion of anti-radicalism. Mendelssohn composed many and varied works, including symphonies, concerti, oratorios, and piano, organ, and chamber music. Mendelssohn played and composed for the organ from the time he was eleven years old. His primary organ works are Three Preludes and Fugues, Op. 37 (1837), and Six Sonatas, Op. 65 (1845).

Mendelssohn died young, at age thirty-eight, on November 4, 1847. His body of work is thus all the more remarkable for having been produced over such a relatively short life span.

The Bloomington, Indiana, chapter of the American Guild of Organists has organized a number of celebratory recitals that will take place locally, including a “progressive” concert called “Mendelssohn on the Move.” Organ students will perform in a succession of three churches on the evening of November 4, 2009 — exactly 162 years after the composer’s death.