Titular organist of Notre-Dame de Paris from 1900 until his death in 1937, and master of its superb 1867 Cavaillé-Coll instrument, Louis Vierne confided to it his closest thoughts. Following the eldritch splendors of the Third Symphony for organ (1911), the Pièces en style libre, composed in 1913, work a vein of intimate fantasy often laced with Vierne's penchant for the grotesque and bizarre. Specified as suitable for performance on a harmonium, the composer's registrations nevertheless indicate a variety of coloristic effects which come off adequately only on large instruments, while the grandeurs of several demonstrative numbers—e.g., the Cortège, or the Carillon—exceed the harmonium's modest capacity. The collection runs the gamut of major and minor keys in order—C major, C minor, D flat major, etc.—in a salute to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.

But the Pièces en style libre have neither the inexhaustible variety of that work, nor its revealing exploration of musical processes. Seldom lasting more than three or four minutes, these are very personal, occasionally confessional, mood and genre pieces. The "Préambule" (No. 1), for instance, is ruminative and serenely flowing, the "Complainte" (No. 3), "Épitaphe" (No. 4), "Méditation" (No. 7), and the like, meet conventional expectations. Some numbers—e.g., the "Prélude" (No. 5), "Madrigal" (No. 9), "Rêverie" (No. 10—a daydream after the manner of Franck's Cantabile), or the "Lied" (No. 22)—disarm one with an ingenuously overflowing lyric charm. And to charm a certain strangeness adheres in such numbers as the archaizing "Canon" (No. 6), the seductively dance-like "Canzona" (No. 12—which recalls Franck's little Andantino), or the chromatically inflected "Arabesque" (No. 15). Even the naïve diatonic melody of the "Berceuse" (No. 19)—dedicated to Vierne's daughter, Colette—soon acquires an oddly piquant chromatic sophistication. Playing around nine minutes, the longest piece in the collection, the obsessive, grimly grinding "Marche funèbre" (No. 18), takes one aback by a brief central chorale of stunningly glib optimism. Finally, there are the handful of brilliant showpieces without which no Vierne collection would be complete—an elfin "Scherzetto" (No. 14), the dramatically careening, starkly powerful "Cortège" (No. 2), the virtuosic, calliope-like "Divertissement" (No. 11), an animated "Carillon de Longpoint" (No. 21—one of the grandest of the several carillon evocations which dot Vierne's organ works), and the "Postlude" (No. 24) with its large, peremptory, conclusive gestures.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi