Sortie improvisée (NDP, 15 Août 1962) - Pierre Cochereau (tr. David Briggs at St Etienne, Caen).

Sortie improvisée (Fête de l'Assomption, Notre-Dame de Paris, August 1962) - Pierre Cochereau (transcribed and performed by David Briggs on the 1885 Cavaillé-Coll organ at the Abbatiale St Etienne, Caen, Normandie).
The ‘Cavaillé-Coll’ effect. I remember experiencing this for the first time at la Cathédrale de Luçon (Vendée) on a family holiday in 1977 - and it still has the same effect on my system! I was then 14 years old, and I remember my dad (who died just two years later) clapping loudly in the nave, and gesticulating wildly to attract the attention of the Organist, who was rehearsing for a concert high up in the west end gallery. I remember the curious mélange of blood-curdling embarrassment and irrepressible, spine-tingling excitement. In his loud (and decidedly dodgy) Franglais, my dad explained that his son was a budding organist and asked if it would be possible to come up and visit the console. We did, and the late Jean-Louis Gil (who was rehearsing some impossibly dense but totally wondrous Reger) allowed me to play ‘Heut triumphiret Gottes Sohn’ from the JSB Orgelbüchlein. Although this was my first direct contact with the keys of a Cavaillé-Coll, what I’ll never forget is hearing him play the big Reger on the tutti - I’d never heard anything quite like it and this remains one of those ‘before-and-after’ moments, the like of which happen only rarely in your life.
With almost zero travel during lockdown, like most people I had the opportunity to revisit other compartments of my life. One of these was to deeply immerse myself in a large Cochereau transcription project, the first time I’d transcribed any of the great master’s improvisations since 1997. About twenty years ago I was given two rather priceless small reel-to-reels by the Californian Organist, the late Frederic Tulan. Fred was a great friend of Pierre and frequently visited the tribune at Notre-Dame. These tapes were fully-loaded with improvisations from the Festival of the Assumption 1962 and 1964, when the maitre was in his late thirties. The improvisations are like gold dust, created when he was at the height of his youthful and almost overflowing energy. For safeguarding I had the reel-to-reels transferred to CD many years ago and last February transferred them to mp3, and started the long but highly therapeutic process of transcribing them, note by note, bar by bar. Interestingly the process took almost exactly the same amount of time as it did in the late 80’s and 90’s - about 4 hours to transcribe one minutes music. I often think what he would think of someone sitting down in New York City in 2021 with a MacBookPro, Sibelius Ultimate, GarageBand and Bose headphones, minutely dissecting and then reconstructing these spontaneous creations. Cochereau never had the time (nor really the inclination) to sit down and compose - apart from about 5 organ pieces written for the Paris Conservatoire final exams. He was clearly a ‘born-improviser’ (to quote Rolande Falcinelli). His daughter, the wonderful life-force which is Marie-Pierre, once said to me (French accent) “…ee wood ‘ave been amazed that anybody wood lurve him so mooch”. For sure, though, this music so totally merits the enormous effort required to transcribe it, and you can see why Cochereau was such a ubiquitous household name for the whole of his career - the word genius is often used in a rather exaggerated way, but he surely was.
This Sortie was actually improvised on the original 1862 console and so to perform it in a concert at the Abbatiale St Etienne in Caen on Tuesday evening was doubly moving, with all the barker levers clattering away (in the true spirit of the C19th industrial revolution!) and inviting a certain ease of repetition along with a connection to the sound which feels almost as honest as with a good mechanical action. This piece is a wonderful meeting of spirits: Prokofiev, Dupré and Cochereau himself. I’m sorry the sound is only from my iPhone but I hope you’ll get an impression of the sheer wonder of the this instrument, one of the very greatest existing Cavaillé-Coll’s, still in original condition and absolutely beautifully maintained. But beware: the ‘Cavaillé-Coll’ effect is rather addictive, once it’s in your veins it’s rather tricky to shake off...

[@wouterattheorgan]

sounds very awesome!