LDV113-4

Your teachers included Suzanne Chaisemartin, Michel Chapuis and André Isoir. Which of them set you studying the music of Franck? At the beginning of my student years in Paris, when I was studying the piano at the École Normale de Musique and the organ with Suzanne Chaisemartin, I worked on a few pieces with her, in the Dupré tradition, with a view to entering the Paris Conservatoire, as my grandfather wanted me to! But at the age of nineteen, I met Michel Chapuis, and that was a decisive moment for me: the discovery of early music and historical organs, which brought about a real revolution for me, opening up a whole new world. I became deputy organist at Saint-Séverin, on the beautiful neo-Baroque instrument by Alfred Kern, of which my grandfather used to say to me: ‘Yes, but what kind of an organ is that when you can’t play Franck on it?’ I didn’t take the organ course at the Paris Conservatoire (I returned many years later as Chapuis’s assistant, then as a professor, alongside Olivier Latry!), but I was reunited with the works of Franck as a student of André Isoir. I still remember his class on the Choral no.2, and I admired his Franck recording on the organ of Luçon Cathedral. At that same period, when I was twenty-two, I married Yasuko Uyama, a Japanese organist and student of Édouard Souberbielle, who did her diploma recital at the church of Les Invalides with a magnificent performance of the Choral no.3 that greatly impressed André Fleury. Forty years later, my wife assisted me on this recording! 24 FRANCK