Fanfare
Familiarity can risk breeding contempt, but no such threat emerged in reviewing this, the fifth release of Carson Cooman’s organ music to come within my purview. Indeed, although I have a cou¬ple of secondary reservations (noted below), this disc may be my favorite among the five for its repertoire—perhaps because much of the music is at a softer, more lyrical end of the spectrum with relatively little dissonance. As always, Cooman has dedicated each piece to a family member, musi¬cal colleague, or person to be memorialized in a commissioned work.
I dearly love medieval keyboard music, and so Cooman gets off to an ideal start with me in his Gothic Processional, which faithfully reproduces that idiom; it’s my favorite piece on this disc. The Toccata-Rondo is a stylistically updated take of the idiom of Widor and Guilmant, while the Two Impressions, the first very quiet and the second more assertive, employ lovely modal harmonies. Next follow two three-movement works. The Ceremonial Suite, written for the wedding of a family member, features (in Cooman’s own words) “a majestic Processional, a lyrical Aria, and a joyous Grand choeur dialogue.” Concertino III opens with a Praeludiumin the vein of Hindemith’s organ music, followed by a slightly plaintive Canzonetta based on a descending four-note motif, and concluding with a lively, tuneful Jig that invokes the vocabulary of Appalachian folk music.
Several one-movement works follow. The Voluntary on Bachofen again invokes the medieval idiom, albeit this time fused to a more modern one in the course of a lively development. Prelude on Materna offers a twice-over treatment of the melody known to most folks as America the Beautiful; it is for me the one failure on the disc, as the tune itself is overly sentimental and little is done to develop or vary it. The Paraphrase on a Motive of Andreas Willscher—a fellow organist-composer whose works Cooman has recorded and which I have favorably reviewed in these pages—is the one somewhat Modernistic and dissonant work in the lot here, but it is well constructed. Ciaconna and Ab ortu solis are both gentle, peaceful, and meditative; by contrast Westminster Carillon, which utilizes the “Big Ben” clock cadence and Purcell’s famous Westminster Abbey hymn tune, is boisterous.
Another three-movement work follows in the Kennebunkport Suite, dedicated not to the Bush clan but to the town’s First Congregational Church and its classic 1854 single manual organ. It presents preludes that draw on a trio of classic American hymns: How Firm a Foundation; Nearer, My God to Thee; and Jerusalem, My Happy Home. The disc closes with the suitably breezy “Zephyr” and Pièce héroique that invokes its Franckian forebear in mood though not scale and in a more modern compositional idiom.
Once again Erik Simmons is Cooman’s able advocate at the keyboard and pedals, and well recorded. As usual the booklet provides very brief notes on the pieces, composer and performer bios, organ specifications, and advertisements for previous releases in the series. The secondary reservations I alluded to at the start of this review are two in nature. The first concerns one occasional weaknesss in Cooman’s compositional style that has become apparent over several releases: In his faster and louder works, he sometimes relies too much on repetition of clichéd ostinato figures (here, in the Toccata-Rondo and the Pièce héroique, though to a lesser degree than in some works featured on previous discs) in attempts to generate energy that simply turn monotonous. The second concerns the organ used here, a modern instrument in Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. While nowhere near as obnoxious as the organ of the Laurenskerk in Rotterdam used in some other Divine Art releases, of which I have complained in previous reviews, this too has the same unpleasant electronic buzz to its sound that is wearing on the eardrums and nerves. ** I do not know why such organs are being chosen, but Cooman, Simmons, and Divine Art need to seek out more congenial-sounding instruments. (I realize this may be a personal preference, but other people who have listened to these CDs with me, including organists, have voiced the same complaint.) But these caveats should not dissuade organ aficionados and fans of Cooman from acquiring this disc; recommended.
** With respect to the critic’s views on the organ: this instrument was referred to as’superb’ in a review of this CD in Choir and Organ magazine, and the Laurenskerk organ similarly dismissed here is ‘large and wonderful’ (American Record Guide) and Classical Music Sentinel said it is ‘outstanding… It can purr like a kitten or roar like a lion, and everything else in between.’
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