Paul Jacobs returned to Davies Hall to give a recital on the Ruffatti organ. I saw his previous performance here in 2009, and I was amazed at how good he made the instrument sound. It's a tricky organ to play well. The acoustics are fairly dry, so when you're playing big, noisy French Romantic pieces that were composed for echo-y churches, you have to adjust your playing, and linger on some of those chords.
Jacobs started the program with a piece by one of his teachers (Weaver, Fantasia for Organ), and he also played a piece by a pianist-friend at Juilliard (Oquin, Reverie). I wasn't crazy about either piece, but it's not polite to comment on pieces by friends and teachers, so I'll say no more about those, although I do support bringing new pieces to audience's attention.
The program opened with the Weaver, and was followed by Sweelinck Variations on "Mein junges Leben hat ein End." Jacobs got to display lots of the color that this instrument can provide, as he moved from variation to variation. Jacobs requested that there be no applause after that piece, and he segued directly into the Bach Fugue in G Major, BWV 577, the "Gigue" Fugue. He played this at breakneck speed, which showed off his hand-eye-foot coordination but made a total mess of the music. It's the way you play a piece you can't stand (any more) but which you play because the crowd likes anything that's familiar, loud, and fast.
The Reger Inferno Fugue at the end of the first half fared no better. After explaining that this was a double fugue, and playing the two subjects, Jacobs launched into the piece, and again, there was so much noise that it was hard to hear anything clearly, even the second theme we have been primed to listen for.
I have a theory: Just as Davies has a reverberation limit, it also has a decibel limit. Beyond a certain volume, you can't make anything louder, or if you try, it's just static. I've heard massive concerts in Davies: Mahler's Eighth, the concert version of Mlada with 200 singers in the Symphony Chorus, a 400-person choir at the Chanticleer Youth Festival in 2010, and others. (I haven't tried anything with serious electronic amplification.) They all seem to top out at some point. The same is true for organ recitals here, and for note-heavy stuff like Reger, it's easy to exceed the limit.
As much as I failed to enjoy the first half of this concert, I was ready to forgive everything in the second half, where Jacobs played one work, the Durufle Suite for Organ, Opus 5. Ah, finally! He slowed down the tempo so that we got to hear all the notes and appreciate how the music developed. The Prelude is, as Jacobs mentioned, very sad, and we got The Full Lament on this one. The middle movement, Sicilienne, was wistful, and the solo stops came in handy. The final movement, Toccata, was brilliant and blaring where needed, but not overdone. This piece was worth the whole concert.
Jacobs played an encore, the Bach A Minor Fugue, BWV 543, which he played because "we hadn't heard enough Bach." Unfortunately, this was like the other Bach: a race to the finish line, seriously accelerating to the end, where he added a jarring A Major chord. All the subtleties of this piece were lost. It's not as if Jacobs were trying to play in the style of Cameron Carpenter, who does outrageous things but with a musical purpose. This was supposed to be legit Bach, even with the bravado suitable for an encore, and it wasn't.
There's one more concert in this year's organ series in Davies, on April 3rd, when Jane Parker-Smith plays Franck, Guilmant, Langlais, and Widor: some of those big, noisy French Romantic pieces. Let's hope she gets enough practice time in the hall to understand that this is not St. Eustache, or even Grace Cathedral.
