Symphony nr 1, Prélude

Vierne in his early career served as assistant to Charles Marie Widor in the Saint Sulpice. What I find intruigong: Vierne composed his first symphony in 1898 - 1899. Widor wrote his tenth and last symphonie in 1898. Although he lived for nearly 40 years (till 1937) after his own tenth symphony and Vierne's first, he never wrote another one.

Widor probably knew that this first symphony of his pupil surpassed anything he himself had written in the genre before.

Though the final of this symphony is probably the most often played movement from it, the most beautiful movement is in my opinion, the first movement, the Prélude. Vierne uses his chromatic and refined harmonic language to create a piece of music that is deeply moving and satifying to play.

Using no more than one simple motive, Vierne builds a large structure that ranges dynamically from very soft, to very loud. He makes full use if the tonal colours of the French Romantic organ and the possibility it offers to create diminuendi and crescendi. I particularly love how after all the drama in this first movement Vierne returns in the last eight bars to an almost simple canon between right hand and pedal with the main melodic motif. With the left hand on the Récit, the right hand on the Positif coupled to the Récit, it is almost like someone acquiescing in his fate. When I play this piece, I know those eight bars are coming, I look forward to it, because they never fail to move me deeply. Which is why it is terribly difficult to play them without error. And indeed, in this perfomance, I make a bit of the mess of the last three bars, most noteably a few extra notes in the left hand and because of the shock of that mistake I forgot to lift the first left hand closing chord....
However, the rest of the performance is, rather to my liking and you'll notice the errors in the last bars only if you're familiar with the music.

So, here is it anyway.