Search - Pierre Cochereau, Not Applicable :: 2 Symphonies improvisees a Notre Dame de Paris

Any new CD of improvisations by Pierre Cochereau is important, but this disc is especially significant. Cochereau was a great symphonist, and it is well known that a symphony was often his preferred musical form for extended improvisations in concert. In more than thirty years of international concert giving, years in which it was common for him to play more than one hundred concerts in a twelve month period, he improvised thousands of symphonies. And yet, despite the fact that his recorded legacy is huge, this particular form is singularly underrepresented on the many albums of him improvisations available previously. We have only three examples which were created specifically for recordings: the four movement symphony recorded for the Aeolian Skinner Organ company at Symphony Hall, Boston, in 1956, the mafnificent four movement symphony of 1963 recorded at Notre-Dame for Philips, and the five movement symphony created for Klavier Records at St. Mary's Cathedral, San Francisco, in 1972. To this we could add also the Triptyque symphonique sur deux themes from L'Art de l'Improvisation, improvised at Notre-Dame for Solstice in 1977. All of the CDs of live recordings released since his death offer only one further example in the four movement symphony of Easter Day 1971, released by Solstice on the album Paques a Notre-Dame de Paris. It is of further note that only two of these examples of improvised symphonies, those from 1956 and 1963, last longer than 20 minutes. The others are considerably shorter. This presents a problem if one wishes to look closely at them in the context of the French symphonic tradition.....Anthony Hammond June 2011