Cinquieme Symphonie: Organ Music by Vierne, Tournemire and Durufle [CD]

The early twentieth century was a period of enormous innovation and inventiveness in French organ music. On his debut album, Charles Maxtone-Smith brings together some of it's finest treasures by three titans of the organ repertoire, namely Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire, and Maurice Duruflé, making full use of the resources of Buckfast Abbey's Ruffatti instrument. Vierne's tumultuous Cinquième Symphonie explores chromaticism through his vivid imagining of two overarching themes which coalesce at the end into a triumphal conclusion. Charles Tournemire evokes the beating heart of French mysticism with his sensuous colour and harmony in an improvisation, later transcribed, on the Marian hymn "Ave maris stella". Vierne's carefully controlled musical forms and Tournemire's evocative expression are synthesised perfectly in the Maurice Duruflé's Prélude, Adagio et Choral varié, whose beauty and power celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.