Works for Organ - Virgile Monin, organ by HENRI MULET

This is a first-rate performance by a young organist of Mulet's organ works, recorded on the Puget organ of Notre Dame de la Dalbade in Toulouse. I'm not a musicologist but I can comment on the recording.The organ is a large French post Cavaille-Coll organ in a wonderful acoustic, perfect for Mulet's music. My only gripe is the recording does not succeed in accurately capturing the widely spaced pipework in the acoustic, with an imbalance between the organ's divisions. This is most noticeable in the change of tonal balance as a final chord reverberates around the church. I am all the same looking forward to M.Monin's next recordings.

There is a very good recording from Priory of Henri Mulet's complete organ works, however this one strikes me as having that extra immediacy in the sound. It really is fantastic - anyone who knows Solstice CDs will need no encouragement; for any organ lovers who've yet to discover one of the most outstanding small labels, you need to hear this! The organist Virgile Monin is perfect, and the notes and artwork, but it is really the sound itself that allows these pieces to be realised in their airy softness (in Rosace), and their full glory (just listen the excitement of Tu es Petra, the grandeur with edge!). The dynamic shading is perhaps more marked than the other recording, giving more colour, and the range of sounds is thrilling; in Vitrail, there is a tune played on a reed stop that has an almost harsh timbre, a bit like quacking, but not quite that far - it works very well in the context. Rosace has a great deal of shading, and the Chant Funebre emerges as ineffably sublime, more consoling than bleak, and again benefitting from deeply satisfying sounds. Everything has a superb sense of body, even though it suggests the spiritual so well - the whole thing seems to be paradoxical, but beauty is certainly there, rough at the edges, sometimes blurred, yet in an idiom of great uplift.