Charles Marie Widor Chansons de Mer

On this disc, Jean Guillou teams up with Edo DeWaart and the San Francisco Symphony for a lush performance of Camille Saint-Saens Symphony No. 3, popularly known as the Organ Symphony. This is a lush performance of the Organ Symphony with spot-on tempi, great orchestral balance, and unsurpassed balance between organ and orchestra. This symphony has one long melodic line after another, and DeWaart keeps a long view that prevents any sense of meandering. The organ is stunningly recorded. Brass blaze with glory. Strings are lush. Timpani are extremely well-defined. The clarity of the recording provides an excellent window into finer details. It is difficult to imagine how anything could have been improved upon. The disc is filled out with a strong performance of Widor's Allegro from his Symphony No. 6. This account of the Organ Symphony has everything going for it. There are no obvious weaknesses. If you have excellent subwoofers, they will get the workout of their life. Very Highly Recommended!

Widor wrote music for a wide variety of instruments and ensembles (some of his songs for voice and piano are especially notable) and composed four operas and a ballet, but only his works for organ are played with any regularity today. These include: ten organ symphonies, three symphonies for orchestra with organ, Suite Latine, Trois Nouvelles Pièces, and six arrangements of works by Bach under the title Bach's Memento (1925). The organ symphonies are his most significant contribution to the organ repertoire.

This is definitely the best recording of Widor's 5th Symphony on record. There are some highlights that set this recording above the others. There is a point at the end of the first movement in which the music builds up to one of the final displays of the theme (timestamp 7:27 on this recording), and I assure you the crescendo Chorzempa does is the best of any recorded.

Charles-Marie Widor was born in Lyon to a family of organ builders and consequently became an organist of great skill and an assistant to Camille Saint-Saëns at La Madeleine in Paris at the age of twenty-four.

Three great names of the organ: Widor, the founder of the french symphonic organ and his two most briliant works; Vandenheuvel, pathfinder of a new era of organ making as show his creations in St-Eustache (Paris) or Genève (Victoria Hall); and Kristiaan Seynhave, a multi-awarded young Flemish virtuoso who impulses extraodinary vitality in his playing. The whole gives a full hour of pure pleasure, with glamorous sound.

Widor was a very fine composer generally. Today he's recognized only for his organ music, but he also composed some first-rate orchestral music, with and without organ, that deserves to be better known. This set of the ten symphonies for organ solo is played with incomparable brilliance and recorded with spectacular impact.

Another feather in the Dutoit/Montreal/Decca cap, not least for the sound engineers' achievement in so brilliantly capturing the mammoth sonorities of the Symphonie funebre et triomphale (whose first performance Berlioz conducted walking backwards at the head of his huge wind-and-percussion band, though—alas for the legend!—with a baton, not a sword). For concert hall, rather than open air performance he later added strings and a chorus, and it is this version that is adopted here (as it was in Colin Davis's 1969 Philips recording). Splendid as that issue was, this new one even surpasses it in clarity and impact, with its majestic brass chords and a chorus that adds incisively to the final climax.

Known as the ‘First Lady of the organ’, Marie-Claire Alain was a strikingly mature, creative and intuitive artist. Spanning four centuries of music, from Baroque masterpieces by the likes of Couperin and Grigny, through cornerstones of the French organ repertoire by Widor, Vierne and Messiaen, to two discs of works by her brother Jehan, this collection is testament to her vast and impressively wide-ranging recording legacy.