Hello Fellow Hauptwerkers,
A complete performance of Cesar Franck's Grande Piece Symphonique has been uploaded to the Contrebombarde Concert Hall:
http://www.contrebombarde.com/concerthall/music/1262
This performance makes use of the non-French tonal resources of the PAB organ, so the registrations and tempi are not what you would expect to hear performed live by Daniel Roth on the Cavaille-Coll instrument at St. Sulpice. I have experimented with PAB's voicing with respect to volume/brightness and microtuning adjustments of whole ranks, and the left-to-right panning of individual pipes within certain ranks. The result is a more close-up sounding instrument; perhaps some of the "coldness" that some fellow forum members have commented about the PAB might be due to its being miked some distance from the pipes (giving rise to less left-to-right panning) in a concert hall that was acoustically engineered for symphony orchestras rather than cathedral organs.
The 80+% data compression of the mp3 file format is evident in the subject performance. Still, I strived to maintain as much dynamic range as possible. Rest assured that the corresponding wav file (and organ library heard live) sounds much warmer than what is heard at the CBCH. Other than the voicing adjustments cited above, I did not employ any third party equalization, no third-party reverberation (i.e., no Altiverb) and zero compression, except for a limiter set to keep the fewest high dB from clipping.
The Franck piece has been in my repertoire since age 19 in 1972, and over the years I have registered the piece for numerous American organs (Skinner, Moller, Austin among the most noteworthy) and Canadian Casavants.
I hope you enjoy what you hear. There is no Youtube video of this piece, as it is nearly 25 minutes in duration, as opposed to Youtube's 10 minute maximum time limitation.
Cheers,
Joe
A complete performance of Cesar Franck's Grande Piece Symphonique has been uploaded to the Contrebombarde Concert Hall:
http://www.contrebombarde.com/concerthall/music/1262
This performance makes use of the non-French tonal resources of the PAB organ, so the registrations and tempi are not what you would expect to hear performed live by Daniel Roth on the Cavaille-Coll instrument at St. Sulpice. I have experimented with PAB's voicing with respect to volume/brightness and microtuning adjustments of whole ranks, and the left-to-right panning of individual pipes within certain ranks. The result is a more close-up sounding instrument; perhaps some of the "coldness" that some fellow forum members have commented about the PAB might be due to its being miked some distance from the pipes (giving rise to less left-to-right panning) in a concert hall that was acoustically engineered for symphony orchestras rather than cathedral organs.
The 80+% data compression of the mp3 file format is evident in the subject performance. Still, I strived to maintain as much dynamic range as possible. Rest assured that the corresponding wav file (and organ library heard live) sounds much warmer than what is heard at the CBCH. Other than the voicing adjustments cited above, I did not employ any third party equalization, no third-party reverberation (i.e., no Altiverb) and zero compression, except for a limiter set to keep the fewest high dB from clipping.
The Franck piece has been in my repertoire since age 19 in 1972, and over the years I have registered the piece for numerous American organs (Skinner, Moller, Austin among the most noteworthy) and Canadian Casavants.
I hope you enjoy what you hear. There is no Youtube video of this piece, as it is nearly 25 minutes in duration, as opposed to Youtube's 10 minute maximum time limitation.
Cheers,
Joe