Lionel Rogg Organ Works

Toccata ritmica; Toccata capricciosa; Fantasie sur Felix namque*; Neuf pièces brèves; Yorokobi – Pièce Joyeuse; Hommage à Takemitsu
* first recording

Anne Page plays the Rieger Organ of St Marylebone Parish Church, London
Regent Records REGCD598

https://www.regent-records.co.uk/


Lionel Rogg marked his ninetieth birthday on April 21, and the organ world has every reason to salute him with warmth due to a musician whose three complete Bach cycles, along with recorded surveys of Buxtehude, Couperin, Grigny, Brahms, and much else, have placed him among the most distinguished interpreters of his generation. Born in Geneva in 1936 and Professor of Organ at the city's Conservatory until 2002, Rogg has also been a composer of quietly persistent originality, and it is to this side of his work that Anne Page now turns in a thoughtfully chosen recital for Regent.

The programme she has assembled covers a wide range. At one end sit the modest Neuf pièces brèves; at the other, the substantial Hommage à Takemitsu, the radiant Yorokobi-Pièce Joyeuse, and two virtuoso toccatas, which frame the disc with an appropriate flourish. It is music that combines a deep love of counterpoint with a thoroughly contemporary harmonic palette, is adventurous and rhythmically alert, and is shot through with a certain playfulness — Rogg's friends, we are told, have taken to naming his many toccatas after pizzas, the better to tell them apart.

The instrument is admirably chosen. The 1987 Rieger of St Marylebone Parish Church, a fifty-two stop instrument recently restored by its original builder and used by the Royal Academy of Music for teaching and performance, possesses precisely the qualities this music requires: a wealth of modern colour, a warm acoustic, and the clarity to illuminate Rogg's frequently contrapuntal and strongly rhythmic textures. Page exploits it with an exceptional ear for registration, drawing from her palette some genuinely arresting combinations.

Nowhere is this more telling than in the Petit dialogue chromatique, where the marking Angosciato and the subtitle Gementes et Fléntes, drawn from the Salve Regina, are realised through the smallest possible intervals, deployed both harmonically and melodically to intensify the anguish the phrase implies.

Hommage à Takemitsu, in four movements based on earth, water, fire and air, is the disc's most ambitious offering. Rogg himself has suggested that his music listens to these elements rather than describing them, allowing unconscious images to shape its form, and that what emerges is something close to an allegory of creation. Page allows the listener to fully immerse themselves in each movement: 'Earth' is broad and imposing; 'Water' is enigmatic to the last bar, while 'Feu' begins as though two flints were being struck and gathers intensity through wonderfully judged stop combinations until a growling pedal and blazing reeds carry the conflagration to its peak before extinction. Air is appropriately ephemeral, weightless, and elusive.

The closing Toccata capricciosa gathers the disc's threads – the virtuosity, the harmonic curiosity, and the rhythmic verve – into a single brilliant gesture, and Page despatches it with the assurance that has marked everything preceding it. Throughout, her registrations allow the intricate inner workings of Rogg's writing to speak with absolute clarity, and Regent's engineering captures both the detail and the bloom of the Marylebone acoustic to fine effect.

The result is, it must be said, a disc whose pleasures will most readily declare themselves to organ aficionados and to those already drawn to contemporary writing for the instrument. The music is consistently intriguing but rarely immediate, and its rewards accrue over repeated hearings rather than at first encounter. For those willing to give it that time, however, Page makes an eloquent and persuasive case for a composer whose ninetieth year deserves precisely this kind of celebration.