PERTH CONCERT HALL RONALD SHARP ORGAN
Jangoo Chapkhana
Move Records MD 3464
We do live in two different countries. I’m not alone in knowing very little to nothing about serious musical activity in Perth, except that we share in the big travellers, i.e. the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Musica Viva. If you listen to ABC Classic, there’s every chance that the West Australian Symphony Orchestra will be heard at some time during the day and most individuals who come to Australia for a capital city tour will include the country’s most isolated one in their visitation rounds.
But I’ve never heard the Sharp organ in the Perth Concert Hall, although the leaflet that accompanies this CD gives a fair amount of information about its construction, its maker and its registration. Sharp built the organ in the Sydney Opera House, and this West Australian instrument is the maker’s second-largest creation; that’s by a long way, incidentally, as the Sydney organ has over 10,200 pipes while its companion has about 3,000. Also, I’ve not encountered Jangoo Chapkhana either, but a simple online check shows that he’s a considerable presence on the Perth music scene, a veteran choral conductor as well as an expert jazz pianist.
You might be puzzled by the choice of repertoire on this disc. Chapkhana pays homage to some of the grandfathers of organ composition: Sweelinck, Buxtehude, J. S. Bach and Balbastre. All fine and perfectly acceptable – just what you’d expect of a compendium to show off the organ’s capabilities at an apical point in composition for the organ and its surrounds. But then we leap forward two centuries from the Balbastre work of 1749 to a couple of Messiaen works of 1939 and 1951/2, a Langlais oddity of 1977, one of Eben’s Four Biblical Dances of 1990, a very short scrap from British organist Gary Sieling, and Chapkhana’s own seven variations on the chorale Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring – the CD’s most recent music dating from 2006.
The CD opens with Buxtehude’s chorale fantasia on Te deum laudamus which falls into five sections, the post-Praeludium segments based on fragments of the Gregorian chant. Chapkhana’s output speaks a forward language, the pedal register exceptionally clean and welded into the fabric of the mini-fugue that makes up the Praeludium‘s second part. A slight misstep occurs at the fourth bar of the Te deum laudamus but otherwise the movement proceeds with unstoppable forthrightness, the pedal line now dominant as it handles the melody line with reed-rich reinforcement. As for the long Pleni sunt coeli et terra setting, apart from the felicity of the part-writing, a good deal of interest comes from the manual chopping and changing, even if the overall timbral mix difference is slight in this reading.
For the In Martyrum, the pedal is again entrusted with the chant material, for which Chapkhana employs a resonant brass/reed stop (trumpet or trombone, I can’t tell) which is neatly balanced by the busy and sparkling upper lines. Last of all comes the four-subject fugue (not very elaborate) that blossoms during the Tu devicto arrangement. Both these latter stages continue along the firm, determined path that the interpreter traces with considerable eloquence throughout this happy harbinger, written when Bach was approximately 5 years old.
There’s no end to the arguments about the instruments you can use for Sweelinck’s keyboard music and I’ve heard the Fantasia Chromatica on organ, piano, harpsichord, even arranged for strings. Chapkhana’s interpretation is welcome for its clarity of line and, as with the preceding Buxtehude, an authoritative directness of address, the alterations in timbre respectful and organized in a manner that stays within the possibilities of an organ from the composer’s time. You will find it hard to fault the supple understatement of the lower lines and the dearth of encrusting ornamentation.
Suddenly, we hit the big time with Bach’s Komm, Heiliger Geist Fantasia BWV 651 and Chapkhana does it proud with a powerful full organ for the manuals and a splendid, full-bodied pedal outline of the cantus firmus. The interpretation manages to make an eloquent fusion of the three-part fugue and its thunderous underpinning, where the line-concluding note lengths follow traditional editions. This track kept drawing me back to revel in its digital agility and the welcome lack of delay in the pedal work; mind you, that attraction might also have been due to the buoyant image of the Paraclete’s endlessly beating wings over the resonant hymn of appeal and adoration from a militant humanity.
This is followed by another of the Eighteen Chorale Preludes: Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 659 – the first of three settings in that publication. As every Bach-committed organist knows, in this setting the chorale tune is given by the right hand but is decorated to within an inch of its sustainability, here riding high above its placid, walking support with nasal penetration, probably helped along by a mixture stop (can’t be sure, it’s so long since I had access to an instrument of substance). What is also distinctive about this reading is its lack of self-indulgence in the face of the linear ornamentation; the organist sticks to his last and preserves the metrical pulse without any rubato, as far as I can hear.
Concluding the Golden Oldies section, Chapkhana airs one of Balbastre’s noels, specifically Votre bonte Grand Dieu from the Second Suite. I’m more familiar with the same type of composition by Daquin but this track shows a similarity between these contemporaries. The score comprises the tune itself and five variations with a rustic 6/8 interlude between the last two. Once again, the approach to this piece proved metrically consistent and packed with variety as the variations’ repeated halves swung round (except for the Leger Sans vitesse interruption). I came across only one flaw in this dangerously clear-voiced account: at the bar 96 repeat, a muffed right-hand A.
Then we jumped to our times, beginning with one of Langlais’ Book 1 Mosaiques: Sur le tombeau de Buffalo Bill. I believe that the famous bison killer was buried at Lookout Mountain, Colorado and the composer might have visited the site on one of several tours across the United States. In any case, the work was written in 1977 and begins with a gentle, melancholy theme that is subjected to several variations which become increasingly elaborate melodically before the work ends with a quiet reminiscence of the initial melody – a conclusion that might suggest Western plains and the wide open spaces that the dead man inhabited. It’s a rarity, a piece about which little has been published, but this account imbues it with a certain whimsical appeal.
Messiaen is represented by two works: Joie et clarte des Corps Glorieux from (unsurprisingly) Les Corps Glorieux, and the most well-known of the movements from this 1939 compendium; then Chants d’oiseaux from the centre of Livre d’orgue of 1951/2. It’s always enjoyable hearing how organists adapt what they have to the specifications that the composer asks for; in the first of these, the problem is less demanding because the work stays on an even keel for most of its length, but the changes asked for the orgy of bird-calls is ridiculously demanding.
It strikes me that Chapkhana is a sympathetic spirit when faced with Messiaen’s insistent ecstasy in fast mode. He invest the first of these excerpts with a disciplined excitement, even when dealing with its less voluble moments, as when the composer alternates two chords repeatedly. But the basic opening pattern and the following recitative-like flurries come off with infectious elan; it’s like listening to a more focused elder brother to the exuberant Transports de joie from L’Ascension of 1933/4. In contrast, the Chants d’oiseaux is a minefield requiring agility and control of the necessary resources. It has more timbral variety than the slightly later Catalogue des oiseaux – which is stating the obvious – and Chapkhana works carefully through its flurries of action and many punctuating points d’appui.
The composer is an intriguing character, mainly because of the arcane characteristics of his language – the Oriental rhythms, birdsongs, modes, febrile athleticism alongside super-slow meditations. I saw him once, in Hamer Hall, at a performance of the Turangalila-symphonie which he followed with a score; the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra had to import a last-minute player for the ondes Martenot because the originally scheduled artist couldn’t handle the work’s demands. But my favourite anecdote came from colleague Anna King Murdoch who accompanied the composer and his entourage to the Dandenongs in pursuit of a lyrebird’s song. At the crucial moment, Anna trod on a twig, which silenced the bird – to the chagrin of the squawk-fancier who was unable to transcribe the call into his lengthy collection; yet another case where love’s labour’s lost.
It’s inevitable that the Czech composer Petr Eben should be compared to Messiaen in that both were formidable players and composers for the organ. Juxtaposing the Chants d’oiseaux with Eben’s The Wedding at Cana from his Four Biblical Dances made sense, although the extract from Les Corps Glorieux sounds more relevant. Eben doesn’t go in for those pages of unbarred bird-song recitative or abrupt three-chord ejaculations but is more likely to treat with a full-blown melody. Mind you, he can do so with the same riotous facility that the French composer relishes, but this particular work sits in a more comfortable, orthodox framework. The dance is a lively one – no reverential pauses for water-to-wine miracles – and seems to feature a virtuosic role for pedals towards the end.
Gary Sieling’s Pavan differs from most of its kind by running to the pulse of 5/8. Chapkhana employs flute stops for this placid 2004/5 exercise in charming inoffensiveness where an ordinary harmonic vocabulary is spiced up by the gentle presence of a mild dissonance (see the piece’s last chord). The composer is something of an all-rounder in the best British tradition: he’s credited in the CD’s liner notes as Director of Music at Bromley Parish Church in London but no, he’s moved on from that to Reading and seems to be a mobile force in the UK’s organ world. His Pavan is a well-constructed bagatelle, a welcome pause on the way to this recording’s finale.
Which comprises Chapkhana’s set of variations. He states the chorale in a setting notable for crawling chromatics which manages to raise the unlikely combination of Ives and Reger. Moreover, you can forget that lilting 9/8 metre used (twice) by Bach in his Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben cantata, as well as those amiable concordant memories associated with Myra Hess’s arrangement(s) because here the chorale is given in 4/4 time. Variation 1, Alla Danza, is a saltarello for the right hand with the chorale – now in its original triple tempo – below it; the whole effect is bitingly bitonal, thanks to insistent treble dissonances above the imperturbable tune. Then we have Alternating Chords which are really thirds that set the theme as a quick-step duet for flutes.
A Scherzino follows, pitched at the top of the instrument’s range and passing very swiftly in a variant unflustered by any deviation from utilizing the melody straight. The canonic Variation 4 puts the chorale back into 4/4 in a prominent left-hand role while the softer upper line offers an elaboration of the tune with piquant harmonic clashes. A Plenum movement flattens the tune out into a march with plenty of filler to produce a thoroughly British ambience, suggestive of a fast voluntary heard in a provincial cathedral. Next comes a three-line Contrapunctus where the interplay is suggestive of an Art of Fugue exercise written by Hindemith: disciplined, possibly over-cerebral, cheerful.
Bringing the disc to a close is the final variation, a Toccata with the chorale thundered out by the pedals while a coruscating dance, like Variation 1’s gigue, bounces around in what I think could be octaves – a single line with occasional cadential moves into two independent parts. This strikes me as the most substantial segment of the score and it gives us a buoyant conclusion to a work that doesn’t take itself too seriously but shows a very able mind at work – and an excellent musician, as evident in the totality of this enjoyable CD.
O'Connell the Music 