Lucile Dollat’s program highlights music that comes from a tradition of improvisation and invites us to compare it with how she improvises in real time. Ranging from tightly constructed compositions to works shaped in dynamic reaction to particular instruments and spaces, the selections on tonight’s recital remind us that skilled improvisation requires a plan as well as spontaneity. Indeed, they highlight how spontaneity is itself intentional.

The recital begins with music of Louis Marchand (1669–1732), the French keyboard virtuoso and prodigy who—unfortunately for him—is best known either for a contest against J.S. Bach (1685–1750) in Dresden or for his arrogant and vindictive personality. The most titillating story of the contest follows: A jealous rival of Marchand’s invited the far-superior Bach to an improvisation competition during Marchand’s time in Dresden. Overhearing Bach playing, Marchand realized he was outmatched and escaped back to Paris before the competition took place to avoid humiliation. Another recounts that Marchand and Bach had an amicable contest in which they were judged to be equals. Still another version claims that Marchand left Dresden for no reason other than homesickness. It is impossible to know what actually happened; however we weigh Marchand against Bach, his style demonstrates what scholar Alexander Silbiger calls “an improvisational art” that characterizes much French organ music of this period—and much of this evening’s program. Marchand’s Grand Dialogue in C major is a massive, rhapsodic fantasia cast in three large sections: major, minor, and major. It begins with a regal prelude in the dotted rhythms of typical French overture style. Perhaps sooner than we expect, a few quicker récit sections follow, featuring a solo stop against accompaniment on another manual. The first large section ends with the eponymous dialogue: trading between the full grand jeu division and a quieter echo on another manual. With the freshness and spontaneity of an expert improvisation, this trading gives way to a solemn minor section before the final joyous return to major in a dance-like triple meter.

Born only a few years before Marchand, Nicolas de Grigny (1672–1703) had an outsize influence on organ music considering his tragically short life. Only one of his organ collections survives: The Livre d’orgue, based on the ordinary of the mass, was famously copied in 1713 by J.S. Bach. Composer George Benjamin called the Récit de tierce en taille (recitative of the third of the tenor) one of the “jewels of Baroque organ music.” Like the récits from Marchand’s Dialogue, it sets a florid solo voice against an accompaniment on another manual. Unlike the Marchand, the solo voice in this case is set in the tenor and played on what organ virtuoso Gillian Weir calls “the sensuous sounds of the tierce combination,” a mutation stop that sounds approximately two octaves and a third above the fundamental pitch. The highly ornamented tenor melody coupled with the chromatically charged accompaniment lend this gem a mystical, even eerie quality.

It was in the years leading up to the storied contest with Louis Marchand that the young J.S. Bach composed the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue. Written between 1710 and 1717, it is indebted to both the rhapsodic Northern style of Buxtehude and the Italian concerto style. The debt to Buxtehude is especially notable in the light of another hagiographic anecdote. In 1705, a young J.S. Bach famously made the long journey from Arnstadt to Lübeck to hear the older, more famous composer’s music—and nearly lost his job upon his unauthorized late return. An inspiration for Bach’s triptych is Buxtehude’s Prelude, Fugue and Chaconne in C major, BuxWV 137. Bach’s imitation is as much an example of one-upmanship as it is an homage: The opening pedal solo is longer than Buxtehude’s, more complicated, and uses the entire range of the pedalboard; the Adagio transitions from a sinuous right-hand melody into a remarkably dissonant chordal texture filled with suspensions, much like the middle section of Marchand’s Grand Dialogue; the Fugue spins out its extended subject in a virtuosic display of joyful contrapuntal prowess.

The music of Fabien Waksman (b. 1980) launches us into the second half of tonight’s concert. Night Windows was influenced by Waksman’s experience of the work of American Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart. Of Pousette-Dart’s paintings, Waksman says that “behind an appearance of stillness, everything vibrates. The canvas seems to move hypnotically in three dimensions, giving the impression that one is being drawn into it.” “Genesis, Red,” the second movement of the three-movement set, recalls the improvisatory quality of Marchand—but this time in a darkly heroic danse macabre. The cinematic, improvisatory feeling continues in “Radiance, Blue,” the final movement of the set. A short introduction on the shimmering voix céleste stop leads to a repeating ostinato pattern, which serves as the background to a searching, sinuous melody that, as Waksman notes, “seems to stretch into infinity, building to a vast crescendo.”

Around the time of a 1927 tour of the United States—during which he visited Los Angeles locations like Hollywood High School and St. John’s Cathedral in West Adams—Louis Vierne (1870–1937) composed his collection Pièces de Fantaisie; we hear “Clair de lune” and “Hymne au soleil” from the second suite tonight. “Clair de lune” is inspired by the poem of the same name by the Symbolist Paul Verlaine, and the piece follows the same ABA form as Claude Debussy’s archetype. The key relationships are similar, and the transition into Vierne’s final section nods slyly to Debussy’s opening. The bombastic opening of “Hymne au soleil” recalls the French overture style of Marchand, who began this concert, and concludes on a triumphant note. But these sections bookend a brief passage of chant-like music that places us squarely in a Gothic cathedral. Perhaps Vierne was thinking of Notre-Dame, whose organ had fallen into disrepair after World War I and necessitated the fundraising that was Vierne’s aim on his tour.

Vierne had a notoriously difficult and unlucky life, and his complex relationship with Marcel Dupré (1886–1971) is a case in point. Like Marchand and de Grigny, Dupré came from a musical family and was a prodigy. He is known among organists as a virtuoso of the highest order, and among his accomplishments was a memorized performance of the complete works of J.S. Bach. A star student of Vierne’s, Dupré covered for his mentor at Notre-Dame during a period of illness and was eventually embraced by some as the permanent organist—an injury that Vierne described in his journals. Vierne and Dupré had an American connection in common: the Wanamaker’s department store in New York, where Vierne had premiered parts of the first suite from the Pièces de Fantaisie. Originally written as incidental music for a play, Cortège et litanie was commissioned for concerts on the Wanamaker organ and later arranged for organ and orchestra. The “cortège,” a solemn funeral procession, begins with a luminous chorale, punctuated by tolls on another manual, likely the chimes or celesta if the organ allows. The “litanie” begins with an ostinato that reappears in Waksman and also recalls the monastic mood of the Vierne. Ultimately, Dupré combines the themes in a climax that satisfies us in its very inevitability.

—Zach Neufeld