Olivier Latry, the titular organist of Notre-Dame, gives a guest performance in Munich: At the end of the autumn of the organ, he delights the audience in St. Michael with an animal program.
The rush is great at the final concert of the Munich Organ Autumn in St. Michael. After all, Olivier Latry, one of the most famous organists for a long time, became even more famous through a sad event. Titular organist of Notre-Dame in Paris since the age of 23, he lost his instrument in the fire in the cathedral in 2019. The main organ, which had been completely refurbished only five years earlier, was spared the fire. But soot and lead particles have so badly affected them that their restoration should take until 2024 – which at least gives Latry the opportunity to travel even more extensively.
You can see from his program that the modest 59-year-old has neither lost his zest for life nor his humor. Gradually it turns out to be a rather animal affair when listening, at the latest in the excerpts from Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals” in Shin-Young Lee’s organ arrangement. After all, the highest pipes of an organ are ideal as a tonal equivalent to whistling and tiling in a “bird house”. Saint-Saëns himself used this effect when he arranged Franz Liszt’s piano piece on “The Bird Sermon of St. Francis of Assisi” for the organ. Especially Olivier Messiaen in his “Verset pour la Fête de la Dédicace”, for whom the birds were anyway “the greatest musicians”, “who inhabit our planet”.
Clarity and precision in finger play
No wonder, then, that visitors to the venerable Jesuit church were already able to feel like they were in a birdcage during the contemporary opening piece: In “MM” by Jon Laukvik, minimal music repetitions in the highest registers come from the loudspeakers, doubled live by Olivier Latry will. The clarity and precision of his finger play are already visually fascinating on the video screen in the front of the church. In contrast, the color mixes with lower registers in Louis Vierne’s “Hymne au Soleil” or Latry’s own composition in the style of the Fond d’orgue after Louis Marchand appear subtle, refined in the French tradition. “Now thank all God” is rightly called the chorale with which Latry crowns the lively afternoon in free improvisation: thematically not too purposeful, but highly virtuoso alternating between the four manuals, in the frenzied work of footwork. The visitors also thank them – with standing ovations.