Summer Concert Series: Sacred Music in a Sacred Space
September 12 - 7:30 pm

L’Orgue Mystique by Charles Tournemire

Organist Richard Spotts will present an organ concert on the magnificent Casavant organ at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul at 7:30 pm on Friday, September 12. The recital will feature movements from Charles Tournemire seminal work, L’Orgue Mystique. Although today Tournemire is shrouded in popular obscurity, Tournemire was one of the greatest organists of his day with his mystical organ style directly influencing the works of Olivier Messiaen, Ermend-Bonnal, Joseph Bonnet, Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur, Jehan Alain, Maurice Duruflé and Jean Langlais. Born in Bordeaux in 1870, Tournemire, who was a student of César Franck and Charles Marie Widor, became organist of Sainte-Clotilde in 1898, a post Tournemire retained until his death in 1939.

Tournemire, who is most famously known as an improviser extraordinaire, wrote his great magnum opus, L’Orgue Mystique, between 1927-1932. This piece is a fifty-one volume, two-hundred-fifty-three movement, work of liturgical pieces written for the Roman Catholic Mass is based upon over three-hundred Gregorian Chants. L’Orgue Mystique transformed the sound of the organ world, welcoming it into modernity, and although cited by organists as a pivotal point in music, it is shrouded in popular obscurity due to the growing secularization of society in the twentieth century and the dark cloud of the Great Depression and the impending World War which would enveloped Europe at the time.

Organist Richard Spotts, a native of Bucks County, Pennsylvania and a graduate of Westminster Choir College here in Princeton, has set out to perform and educate the public of this seminal work, with the ultimate goal of performing the complete fifteen hour cycle in a recital series over a period of ten days. This project has taken him parishes and cathedrals far afield such as the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Denver, Trinity Copley Square in Boston, and the National Cathedral in Washington, DC in addition to churches in Atlanta, Miami, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Toronto, and Québec City. So far Mr. Spotts has given over sixty recitals involving fifty institutions in the United States and Canada and he is now in the process of writing a book on the subject.

This concert is free and open to the public, although donations to the organ restoration fund will be accepted. For more information, contact Scott Vaillancourt at Scott.Vaillancourt@PortlandDiocese.org or call at 240-9419.