Once again, an excellent
release from Hortus, the second in their
series of discs of the organ works and
motets of Saint-Saëns. This disc,
focusing on works written for liturgical
performance at La Madeleine is perhaps
not the most attractive in terms of
repertoire. There is really no great
music here, but the lovingly musical
playing of Vincent Genvrin, surely one
of the most talented French organists
of his generation, and the slightly
over-the-top operatic singing of the
soloists, just right in my opinion,
serve the music so well as to make this
an enjoyable experience.
A major black mark
is the booklet however. Hortus's booklets
have a habit of missing out important
information, but this misses out Saint-Saëns’
dates, the technical data about the
recording, in the English text, any
information about the organ, and the
texts of the motets! Instead we have
an interesting (but duplicated in all
the other Saint-Saëns discs) essay
by Vincent Genvrin and adverts for other
Hortus releases. It’s not good enough.
Seeing as Hortus don't
want to tell English speakers, I will
try to fill in some information about
the fabulous Cavaillé-Coll featured
here. It was built in 1864, so is an
early second-period example (the Romantic
period for those who like to divide
Cavaillé's work into Classical,
Romantic and Symphonic periods), contains
just 24 stops over 2 manuals, with a
'real' pedal until middle G and the
highest 10 notes 'en tirasse'. Astonishingly
never restored, this marvellously preserved
example is of course generally forgotten
due to the presence of its 1889 monster
sibling across town in St Sernin. My
fellow writer for Musicweb, Graham Scott,
while studying in Toulouse, used to
extol the virtues of the Gesu instrument,
and, on the basis of this recording
it’s easy to see (or hear) why. Cavaillé-Coll,
perhaps more than any other builder
in organ-building history, had the ability
to maximise a relatively small number
of stops and make an instrument that
was so much more than the sum of its
parts. It sounds gorgeous here, aided
by the roomy acoustic.
So while the music
is not the best Saint-Saëns ever
wrote, this is a worthwhile release
due to the quality of performances and
especially the quality of the organ.
Chris Bragg
for details
Vincent Genvrin, organ, Sylvie May (soprano),
Francoise Masset (soprano), Catherine Ravenne
(alto) 
