FRANK MORANA
AmerOrganist 34/10

Jacques Ibert was born in the very year that César Franck

died--1890--and in this composition, he appropriates

Franck's concept well. This publication is a new issue of

an original edition from 1921, but it is not stated whether

there has been any substantial text revision. The work

displays many beautiful harmonic piquancies, is lucid,

playable, and the pedal part is not at all demanding. There

are some clichéd 4-3 suspensions and a few disappointing

foreshortenings in the phrasing. The structural richness

that the work seems to promise at the outset unfolds as a

rather pedestrian dialogue between the principal and

subsidiary divisions of the organ, in which, moreover, the

opening "chorale" melody is too quickly abandoned. The

middle section--a series of figural gestures without change

of tempo, meter, or mood--offers little contrast from what

precedes. The ensuing fugue begins promisingly with a

regular contrasting countersubject, but is quickly

pre-empted by a grandiose coda.