Isabelle Demers: Magnificent French-Canadian Organinst Plays at Organ Pavilion July 25

>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Isabelle Demers is a French-Canadian (Québecois) organist who’s played at the Organ Pavilion at least once before her marvelous concert last night, July 25, as part of the Spreckels Organ Society’s annual Monday night summer international concert series. Last night she opened her performance with a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach – to whom she paid tribute as a pioneer of recycling, since this piece betan as a keyboard work for harpsichord, then became a movement of his cantata “Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal in das Reich Gottes eingehen” (“We must, through much tribulation, enter into the kingdom of God”), and was finally transcribed for organ by Marcel Dupré. It never ceases to amaze me that organists continually transcribe Bach’s music for other instruments when he left so much splendid music actually written for organ, but Bach himself moved his stuff around from one instrument or set of instruments to another that he’s about the last composer of whom you can say, “That piece was written for X, and should be played on X and nothing else.” Whatever the piece’;s provenance (and I own an LP of Dupré playing Bach and playing him in a decidedly French manner), Demers performed it magnificently, making it powerful and emotional and completely avoiding the snig-songy style the so-called “historically informed performance” crowd tells us is THE “correct” way to play Bach.

The next piece on Demers’ program was a charming piece called “Impromptu sur le Choral de Luther,” Op. 69,, by Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888), who was born the same year as Wagner and Verdi. I’m not sure what possessed a Jewish composer like Alkan to write a piece based on a Protestant hymn for a mostly Catholic country, but I suspect the word “Impromptu” in the title may mean it was a piece Alkan originally improvised and then wrote down from memory. (Liszt did that a lot; he would do an improvisation one night and then write it out the next day, publishing it as a “variation” if the original was by another composer and a “revision” if the improvisation was based on a work of his own.) There’s a marvelously infectious passage at about 1:20 of this YouTube post of the work by duo organists Marie-Ange Laurent and Eric Lebrun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7caOwlFWCag) in which Alkan eerily anticipates jazz, especially in the walking-bass line and the double-time figurations above it, even though jazz was almost a century in the future when Alkan composed it. (There are intimations of jazz in even earlier classical pieces, notably the walking-bass line played by a pizzicato cello at the start of the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 9, third and last in the so-called “Rasumovsky” cycle, after the prince who commissioned them.) The Alkan work was a brilliant showcase for Demers’ playing, especially in the softer sections in which she was able to use the latest addition to the Spreckels Organ, a whole new rank of flute pipes. Indeed, she was sufficiently “taken” with these added pipes that she picked a lot of registrations that would use them.

The final work in the first half of the concert was misattributed in the program to modern-day French-Canadian composer Rachel Laurin (b. 1961) but it was really the last two movements of the Organ Symphony No. 1 ini D minor, Op. 14, by Louis Vierne (1870-1937). Demers described Vierne’s life as unusually sad, which his Wikipedia page backs up: he lost his mother in 1902 (when he was 31), he divorced his wife in 1906 on grounds of infidelity, and while she got custody of their younger children he kept their oldest son, Jacques, who enlisted in World War I even though he was underage and committed suicide in November 1917 while Vierne himself was in Switzerland being treated by glaucoma. Perhaps the most macabre story of Vierne’s life was the way it ended: as his Wikipedia page states, “On the second of June 1937, Vierne gave his 1,750th organ recital at Notre-Dame. He completed the main concert, which members of the audience said showed him at his full powers (‘as well as he has ever played’), playing his ‘Stele pour un enfant défunt’ from his Triptyque, Op. 58. The closing section was to be two improvisations on submitted themes. He read the first theme in Braille, then selected the stops he would use for the improvisation. He suddenly pitched forward, and fell off the bench as his foot hit the low ‘E’ pedal of the organ. He lost consciousness as the single note echoed throughout the church. He had thus fulfilled his oft-stated lifelong dream — to die at the console of the great organ of Notre-Dame. Maurice Duruflé, another major French organist and composer, was at his side at the time of his death.” (One wonders what Duruflé was doing there; had he just turned pages during the written portion of the concert, or was he there in case Vierne didn’t make it through the concert and the church authorities needed someone to take over in mid-performance?) Indeed, there’s one report that some of Vierne is still there: allegedly some of his remains were interred in the organ bench at Notre-Dame.

The pieces Demers played by Vierne were the last two movements, the Scherzo and Finale, of his first organ symphony – a designation French composers gave to multi-movement pieces for solo organ because they were designed to exploit the additional stops and overall orchestral sonics French organ builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll started incorporating into his organs in the late 19th century. Demers once again used the new flute stops big-time in the Scherzo and played the Finale with the proper panache. After the intermission Demers played the piece she had actually programmed by Rachel Laurin, an Introduction and Passacaglia based on a theme by her composition teacher, Raymond Daveluy. According to Demers, Laurin first heard the theme one night when Daveluy was practicing in a deserted church, and she never forgot how spooky it sounded since it was a bass melody and Daveluy was playing it almost entirely on the foot pedals. It was a finely honed piece of music, “modern” but without the sour dissonance that put so many people off of modern classical music (an oxymoron if there ever was one!).

Then came the highlight of the program, the complete 1919 suite from Igor Stravinsky’s orchestral ballet The Firebird, first of the three major ballet scores (the others were Petroushka and The Rite of Spring) that established his reputation. She played the piece in her own organ transcription, and she managed to create a quite stunning reproduction of Stravinsky’s orchestral sound. Only in a few moments did I miss the extra “oomph” this music has in its original form. I wish she had done the 1945 version of the Firebird Suite instead, since Stravinsky added back two movements from the full ballet score, a pas de deux for Prince Ivan and the Firebird and a charming scherzo called “The Princesses Play with Their Golden Apples.” But what she did play was so stunning and powerful I didn’t really mind that she didn’t play a fuller version of this magnificent music. And unlike the previous two organists in the series, Nicole Keller and Cherry Rhodes, Demers did play an encore. Protesting that her hands were tired from this workout she’d given them, she performed a work written almost exclusively for the feet: another Charles-Valentin Alkan work, the twelfth and last in a series of variations for pedals. (A pianist uses foot pedals merely to alter the characteristics of the sound; an organist actually plays notes on the pedals as well as controlling the “swells,” the shutters that open and close during an organ performance to control the volume and add colors and textures the way pianist does by how hard he or she strikes the keys.)

It was a marvleous capstone to a very exciting, moving and splendid concert. Incidentally, the last time Isabelle Demers played at the Organ Pavilion she was selling CD’s, and I bought one called The Old and the New; this time, alas, she didn’t have a merch table and I didn’t get to ask her how her last name is pronounced. Most everyone at the Organ Pavilion called her “DEE-murs,” the normal pronunciation in English, but I suspected it was really “Duh-MAIR” because of her French-Canadian background, and the vice-president of the Spreckels Organ Society introduced her as “Duh-MAIRS.” The nezt Monday night concert is ono Monday, August 1 and 9:30 p.m. featuring organist Chelsea Chen, a San Diego native. She's a wonderful player and it should be a great night mixing classical and popular music. Be there!