It has not been the happiest 200th birthday year for César Franck. “What Happened to One of Classical Music’s Most Popular Pieces?” this newspaper asked a few months ago — the headline to an account of how Franck’s Symphony in D minor, once a standard, largely vanished from concert programs.
That symphony has not been widely revived even for this anniversary year, and Franck’s most often heard piece is probably his lush, musing Violin Sonata. But he spent decades at the organ console of Ste.-Clotilde in Paris and as a professor of that instrument at the Paris Conservatory; in his lifetime, he was best known as an organist and a teacher.
So it is fitting that among the most prominent 2022 celebrations — indeed, one of the few 2022 celebrations — has come from Paul Jacobs, one of the finest organists and teachers of our day. Jacobs played six of Franck’s pieces at a concert in March, and on Tuesday another six, completing the set of this composer’s 12 major organ works.
Both recitals took place at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Midtown Manhattan, known informally as “Smoky Mary’s” for what is said to be lingering hints of incense in the air. Its organ, built by the Aeolian-Skinner company, was installed in 1932 and has been lovingly kept since then; it is one of the major instruments of New York, capable of filling a space whose reverberation gives music both clarity and room to breathe.
In March, Jacobs played the three pieces Franck wrote in the late 1870s, and the three sprawling, pensive chorales that were the great product of 1890, the year he died. The 75-minute, intermissionless program on Tuesday pushed further back in time, to the “Six Pièces pour Grand Orgue” that were written soon after Franck took up his position at Ste.-Clotilde, in 1858, and published in 1868.
These are Romantic outpourings, their structures grand, if improvisatory in feel. Yet Jacobs kept them from turning turgid — his tempos flowing while conveying the weight and depth of the music. He began the “Fantaisie” with mysterious, almost meterless delicacy, like the prelude to “Parsifal”; in the “Pastorale,” his palette extended to spicy burnt umber and milky pale blue, mellow oboe and sweetly piercing flute.
Jacobs’s textures were also beautifully varied in the “Prière,” the trumpet mellowed by the vast space without losing its focus; the “Prélude, Fugue et Variation” was a wistful nocturne, sensitively controlled and never overblown. The “Final” moved from roaring lows to shimmering highs, its dotted-rhythm motif bounding before its pile-on conclusion.
Jacobs played the “Final” third. His even apter finale to the concert was the “Grand Pièce Symphonique,” which lasts nearly half an hour and influenced a generation of large-scale solo organ works. Here it was clear in its hovering veils of sound, its quietly lyrical serenity and its toccata flurries, before a steady, triumphal ending.
If Franck is to have such scattered tributes this year, at least Jacobs has done him justice.
Paul Jacobs
Performed on Tuesday at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Manhattan.
