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Jeanne Demessieux plays the complete organ works of Cesar Franck at the 1846 Cavaille-Coll in La Madeleine, Paris.
Festivo FECD155-156 (2 CD set) Available from OHS for $US37.73 including $10.75 for airmail delivery.
In 1974, I bought two vinyl LPs of Jeanne Demessieux playing Franck at the Madeleine. They very quickly became the benchmark by which I judged all subsequent playing of the composer’s organ works.
Despite having almost extravagant care taken of them, the LPs gradually developed surface popping and sputtering, which though minimal, eventually led me to see if by any chance the recordings had been made available on CD. To my great delight, they have. And not only do the CDs contain that which was on the original LPs, but Franck’s complete works as a “top-up”.
These are, of course, historical and highly cherished recordings. Mme Demessieux, alas, died of cancer at the height of her powers in 1968. But the Franck recordings under consideration were made in mid-1959. The re-working of the originals for CD by Festivo in Amersfoort , Netherlands , has been done with great skill, and I note that the original warmth and ambience created by Mme Demessieux has been enhanced considerably by the absence of most of the hiss and all of the vinyl surface noise.
Close your eyes and listen. OK, you could tell, if pressed, that the recordings are not digital, but you’d probably not realise that they are 47 years old. The 1959 recording engineers must surely have had state of the art equipment and the skill to get the best out of it.
What an extraordinary organist, though. If you look for pictures of her on the Internet, you will see her seated at the organ wearing high-heeled shoes, which was her custom. And she was renowned for her pedal technique! I wonder if she was overshadowed in any way, during her six year tenure at the Madeleine, by the powerful presence of Cochereau at Notre Dame?
I have a recording of Cochereau playing some of the same pieces at Notre Dame, from roughly the same period, and although impressive and assertive, I always tended to come back to Jeanne Demessieux because of her wonderful sense of balance, anticipation and spine tingling mastery of the Madeleine’s acoustics.
And on the CDs, it’s even better.
Cavaille-Coll’s organ seems to have escaped the more showy and frivolous additions and alterations that were inflicted on many other instruments of the era. The first restoration was in 1927, by Mutin, and the second in 1957, by Roethinger. (There have been two further restorations, but this is as it sounded in 1959.)
As far as I can tell, the organ retained most of its original tonal integrity, and it must be, going by these dates, incredibly reliable and durable.
“It is a pleasure for me to write a few introductory lines to the new CD release of the recordings of Jeanne Demessieux, my sister, who played Cesar Franck’s complete works for organ at the organ of the Madeleine, Paris in 1959. I am also grateful to the firm of Festivo in Amersfoort , the Netherlands , for the other editions on CD of my sister’s recordings, Volumes 1, 2, and 3. It is essential that the present generation of organists and the entire organ world is able to listen to the performances and interpretation of the unforgettable artist Jeanne undoubtedly was. Listening to the compositions and in particular the performance of organ literature in general will be exemplary and illuminating for many organists and organ lovers.”
