Here is a recording by a young musician, Christopher Houlihan, who has yet to finish his undergraduate degree in organ, studying with John Rose at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. At age 19, he spent his junior year abroad at Trinity College’s Paris program, where he studied organ and harmony with Jean-Baptiste Robin at the Conservatoire National de Région de Versailles. He also served as an assistant at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. Houlihan has twice been a prize winner in the Albert Schweitzer Festival Organ Festival/USA Competition and was awarded the 2005 and 2007 Charlotte Hoyt Bagnall Scholarship for Church Musicians.
Phillip Truckenbrod writes a very engaging portrait of this young artist, just beginning his career and yet years ahead in his musical and interpretive skills, noting that he is a “ . . . very balanced young man and is popular, even beloved among his fellow students, and during his freshman year his many campus friends formed a group known as the ‘Houli Fans’ who show up to his performances (with several experiencing an organ recital for the first time) to cheer and yell and demonstrate their loyalty.” How engaging and refreshing that young students of the organ should have other friends besides just organists and be able to bring their love of the instrument to people who maybe would never consider attending an organ recital.
This first recording of Christopher Houlihan opens with two works by Charles-Marie Widor, the spiritual predecessor of Louis Vierne. It was Widor who numbered Vierne among his pupils and immediately recognized his talent. Further, it was Widor who made Vierne his assistant at St. Sulpice—a great honor from a teacher who was a stern taskmaster and not one to acknowledge a student’s abilities or talents.
The two excerpts by Widor that open this recording are the Allegro from the Sixth Symphony in G minor, op. 42, no. 2, and the Andante Sostenuto from the Gothic Symphony in C minor, op. 70. Widor’s music is often divided, like the music of Beethoven, into three periods. This Sixth Symphony (Widor most often referred to his organ symphonies as suites or “collections”) contains an increased interest in contrapuntal techniques and seeks to fully exploit the tonal resources of the Cavaillé-Coll organ in its entire symphonic splendor. The opening Allegro movement is a theme and variations, combining a sixteen-measure theme with a twelve-measure “recitative” idea. These two themes weave themselves together on and off throughout the entire movement and give the work its structural unity and its sense of forward musical motion. Houlihan’s playing is striking in its rhythmic vitality, crispness of articulation, and solid and flawless technique that is put to use in the service of the music and never employed for simply empty technical display.
With the Andante Sostenuto from the Gothic Symphony (Widor’s ninth symphony and a work of his third style period), Widor shows both his ability as an improviser and his increased interest in Gregorian chant during the later part of his creative life. The Gothic Symphony dates from 1895, and—unlike the “Romane” symphony (his symphony no. 10 of 1900)—the plainchant melody is only heard in the third movement, the Andante Sostenuto, which is presented in this recording. Widor quotes the Gregorian hymn Puer natus est nobis (Unto us a child is born), the Introit for Christmas Day, and the work itself is inspired by the glorious Gothic basilica of Saint-Ouen at Rouen. What a marvelous counterpart to the dynamic opening of this recording! Here Houlihan plays with a gentle and well-controlled sense of romantic rubato that is so beautifully crafted that the listener finds himself lost in the sheer beauty of the Great Flute Harmonique on the Austin organ used in this recording. You might find yourself playing this track over and over again. Widor’s American pupil Albert Riemenschneider called this “ . . . a rare movement with a spiritual content so chaste and pure that involuntarily the atmosphere of prayer and incense suggests itself.”
After this love feast of Widor’s music, Houlihan presents the main course of this recording, the Second Symphony in E minor, op. 70, by Louis Vierne. Unlike Widor, Vierne did not use Gregorian chant in his work. Dating from April 1903, this second symphony is much more chromatic, intense and broader in concept than Vierne’s first symphony of 1899. Here Vierne embraces the cyclic form more completely. The challenge for any organist is to make all five movements, different in character yet with the same explosive and almost violent energy, come together as one continuous work that unfolds movement after movement. Christopher Houlihan does this admirably, taking the listener on a journey through the valleys and peaks of this highly personal and complex music, from the opening powerful Allegro through the opposing ideas of the second movement marked Chorale; the third movement, Scherzo, is in classic sonata-allegro form, and is the lightest and most elegant of the movements; the Cantabile fourth movement is a dialogue between the ideas of tonality and modality; and the Final is much more intense and explosive than the last movement of the First Symphony.
The listener soon forgets that he is listening to a 19-year-old American organist who has yet to finish his undergraduate degree, and is swept away with the various moods and emotions that accompany this almost 40-minute exposition of the art of Louis Vierne, at the height of his powers as unanimously elected new organist of Notre-Dame Cathedral by a jury of France’s most illustrious keyboard virtuosi.
The recording closes with the Carillon de Westminster from the Twenty-four Fantasy Pieces, op. 54, no. 6. The famous theme is the chime that is rung by the bells in the clock tower of London’s Houses of Parliament. A 13-ton bell (Big Ben) strikes the hour, and four smaller bells chime what has been known as “Westminster Quarters” every fifteen minutes, increasing the one four-note phrase at the quarter hour to four four-note phrases on the hour when it is joined by that famous big bell. Vierne often would play this piece on his American tours, along with the Berceuse from the Twenty-four Pieces in Free Style and the finale of the First Symphony. What a wonderful finish to this recording, with Houlihan literally dancing through this show stopper to conclude this recording of over 63 minutes of brilliant organ playing.
The mark of a truly great actor is that you stop thinking about the actor himself and focus all of your attention on the character and the story that is told through the performance. After a while you become so engaged emotionally and intellectually that you become one with the story. Listening to this recording, one becomes absorbed in the music, forgetting about the particular organist or the particular organ (we organists love to think about the instrument, don’t we?) and just simply let the music absorb us totally.
It is hoped that this recording will be the first of many from Christopher Houlihan, and you will no doubt become a “Houli Fan” after just a few minutes of listening to this recording.
—David Wagner
Madonna University, Detroit, Michigan
January 23, 2009
THE DIAPASON
