Yon: Complete Organ Music, Vol.1

Sumptuous and spectacular Romantic works
by 'Toscanini's Organist'.

Pietro Yon (1886-1943) played in what is widely regarded as one of the finest-ever performances of Beethoven's Missa solemnis, conducted at Carnegie Hall in 1935 by Arturo Toscanini. Yon was sharing
the stage with the likes of Elizabeth Rethberg and Ezio Pinza; he had acquired a comparable celebrity within the organ world in his lifetime, having emigrated from Italy to the US at the age of 21, and become Organist of St Patrick's Cathedral in New
York, the foremost seat of Catholicism in the US. A New York Times profile portrayed him as an adopted New Yorker who moved in high-society circles and enjoyed ragtime and vaudeville, and he welcomed the likes of Caruso and Toscanini to his home as friends.
When he died in 1943, the world-famous conductor numbered among the 1300 mourners at St Patrick's.

Yon's own music has a post-Romantic, mid- Atlantic flavour reflecting his background without belonging to a single 'school'. Christmas in Settimo Vittone or Rapsodia Italiana draw on his Piedmontese heritage.
The trio of large-scale organ sonatas occupying CD3 emerge from the virtuoso tradition of 19th-century keyboard writing exemplified by Liszt and translated to the organ by French contemporaries such as
Guilmant and Vierne. CD1 is dedicated to a collection of 12 Divertimenti including not only the Italian-themed character pieces mentioned above but also an expansive 'American Rhapsody' - like a transatlantic version of Howells, perhaps, sharing its
chromatic harmony with the music of Leo Sowerby - and shorter study-like pieces which exploit the full range of colours available on the organ of St Patrick's which he had extensively renovated and updated
to reflect changing tastes, rather as Pierre Cochereau did at Notre-Dame in Paris.

The most unusual piece here is the four- movement Concerto Gregoriano for organ and piano. Like Respighi's violin concerto of the same name, the piece takes its themes from the heritage of chant and weaves them into a richly embroidered neo- Romantic structure, but with a Brahmsian grandeur and symphonic impetus which is catalysed by incisive dialogue between the two instruments.

This first volume of Yon's complete Organ Music is played on the magnificent Fisk organ of the Lausanne Cathedral. The full specifications of the organ are included in the booklet.