Robert Delcamp - Works for Organ 12: Ste Bretonne / Trois Esquisses - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The Suite Bretonne, Op. 21, dates from 1923, and is dedicated to Mademoiselle Hilda Gelis-Didot. She was a close friend of the Dupré family, and was related to the Firmin-Didot family, who have been responsible for many years for the publications of the Institute of France. The suite consists of three, short programmatic pieces inspired by a visit Dupré made to Brittany. Berceuse is a cradle-song, which describes the gentle rocking by a mother of her baby's cradle. It uses a folk-like melody which, when it returns, appears in canon at the octave between the soprano and a 4' flute in the pedals. Fileuse (Spinning) portrays a Breton woman at the spinning-wheel. The whirling of the wheel is portrayed through the use of a running semi quaver (sixteenth note) ostinato in the left-hand, played on the Voix Céleste stop, which continues throughout the piece. Les Cloches de Perros-Guirec (The Bells of Perros-Guirec), a small coastal town near Brest in Brittany, depicts a procession of Breton peasants, jauntily on their way to church on a Sunday morning. In Memoriam, Op. 61, is the largest of the composer's last works. It dates from 1965, and is dedicated to the memory of his daughter Marguerite Tollet, née Dupré, who was born in 1909 and died on 26th October, 1963, after a long illness. It is the last in a series of commemorative works which Dupré composed throughout his career in memory of friends and relatives. In the case of his daughter the grief was intense, and Norbert Dufourcq described the work as Inch... a votive stone offered in memory of his child.Inch She was an accomplished pianist, and accompanied him on several tours of the United States, performing works for piano and organ with her father. The six pieces are in two volumes, framed by an elegiac Prélude and a brilliant Postlude. In the intervening movements the composer remembers aspects of his daughter's life,