Duruflé: Requiem / Poulenc: Lenten Motets

Duruflé's father had been an architect and when working on the house belonging to Maurice Emmanuel, professor of the history of music at the Paris Conservatoire, mentioned that his seventeen-year-old son was an organist at the Church of Notre-Dame in Louviers. Emmanuel recommended lessons from Tournemire to prepare Duruflé for the entrance exam to the Conservatoire organ class in the autumn of 1920. But before taking the exam, the young Maurice came to feel Tournemire's freewheeling approach was not what he wanted, and went instead to Vierne. As he later wrote: 'To the same extent that Tournemire made one feel one was sitting upon a volcano about to erupt, Vierne gave one a sense of complete ease. He was always the same from one day to the next.' Vierne was also much stricter than Tournemire over the formal shaping of improvisations, and in retrospect we could say that Duruflé was lucky in benefiting from these opposing approaches of freedom and discipline, which lie at the root of much of the finest art and are certainly to be discerned in his Requiem.

'The balance [in the Duruflé] puts you in the building in the most extraordinary way … that wonderful envelope of sound that just surrounds you as you listen to it. A shout-out for Harrison Cole-he's done an extremely good job as a young organ scholar, aided and abetted by that wonderful French-style organ from van den Heuvel … so many sounds to enjoy … we really must mention David Hinitt and Adrian Peacock who have created a sound which I didn't believe was possible, because it's actually as if you are there … it is totally immersive, I don't know how it's done … wonderful' (BBC Record Review)