Colmar. At the Collegiate Church of St. Martin

The refinement of organ and trumpet

With a program essentially focused on Italian compositions, Giorgio Parolini on the organ and Luciano Marconcini on the trumpet triumphed on Tuesday at the Collegiate Church of Saint-Martin in front of an exceptionally large audience… and for good reason.
The concerts at the Colmar organ festival are magical. Organized by the Friends of the Organs of the Collegiate Church of Saint-Martin, each year they offer unimaginable and delightful journeys to the heart of classical music, through always refined collaborations between the organ and other wisely chosen instruments.
This week it was the trumpet which played to the sprawling variations of the device with pipes, in front of such a large number of listeners that they ran out of programs. No surprise, however, since the show amply deserved a large audience. From the first notes of Pietro Baldassarre’s “Sonata for Trumpet and Organ in F Major”, the brass, strikingly pure, filled out the already very airy tones of the choir organ in a stellar and triumphant allegro.

Effective Dialogue

The slow movement which followed, calmer but also more enchanting, then developed an effective dialogue between the two instruments, leaving each the space they needed. After the third and final movement of the piece, a new allegro that returned to the triumph of the beginning, the trumpeter left the organist play the “Toccata per l’Elevazione”, taken from “Fiori Musicali” by Girolamo Frescobaldi, alone.
Luciano Marconcini’s trumpet resurfaced in the next work, Maurizio Cazzati’s sonata “La Bianchina”. And what a joy to listen to this duo with the priceless collegiate acoustics, which voluptuously amplify, round out, and petrify each note before it disappears.
The rest of the program being performed on the great organ at the back of the church, several music lovers followed the advice given in the introduction by one of the organizers: leave the first rows and go to the middle of the nave, where the great organ offers the best sound. The public thus repositioned then heard “Prelude in g minor” by Dietrich Buxtehude in a style as majestic as it is strict.
The rest of the concert was devoted to the organ- trumpet duo, apart from a few works performed only on the large organ, including the “Concerto in A minor” by Johann Sebastian Bach. The only incident of the evening was the arrival in the middle of the concert of four fanatics who carried on a loud and disrespectful discussion. It took the intervention of a listener for them to finally desist and be silent, leaving the real listeners the pleasure of enjoying the end of the concert in peace and quiet.

(DNA/Colmar, August 12th, 2010)