Toccata from 5th Symphony

My project for this week has been well known French Toccatas. Unsurprising there are many performances of this piece on the concert hall. Surprisingly, extremely few have used Metz, which seems to me to be an obvious choice. In all the years we have had Metz I think it has held its own: it delivers a lot of firepower from a relatively compact design, and it's further-from-the-pipes recording style gives it an atmospheric, impressionistic quality which I think is suited to French symphonic and French 20th century music. My first recording, though I thought it went well while playing, sounded bad to me when I played it back, like a musical equivalent of scrambled egg. I listened to Widor's own performance on Youtube and tried slowing down to his pace. I practiced using Trost to hear everything, attempting to get robotic accuracy. Then I watched videos of performances of this in the great Paris
churches to get the mood and atmosphere, then went back to Metz and tried to add more expression and get the atmosphere. So imagine you are in 19th century Paris whilst listening to this....