From the moment Claude Debussy composed Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), French music changed forever. Floating tonality, dreamlike melodic lines – all designed to capture an impression of nature or an emotion in sound. How does this evocative impressionistic music sound when combined with the colourful, Renaissance-like tones of meantone tuning? Do the mystical sonorities become even more enchanting through the irregular distances of the semitones? During this extraordinary concert on the 31-tone organ, which is based on historical meantone tuning, organist Ere Lievonen and saxophonist Ties Mellema provide a musical answer to this intriguing question.
Claude Debussy disliked the term impressionism, yet he influenced an entire generation of French composers such as Maurice Ravel, Nadia Boulanger, Louis Vierne, André Caplet, Charles Tournemire, and even Henri Sauget. Their music does not seek clear answers or fixed structures, but moments of beauty, fleeting images, and emotions that appear and vanish. The programme includes Debussy’s Pagodes, reminiscent of the Indonesian gamelan music he first heard at the Paris Exposition of 1889. The music makes extensive use of pentatonic scales and imitates traditional Javanese melodies.
Also featured is Pavane pour une infante défunte by Maurice Ravel – another great master who composed, among other things, impressionistic music. After Bolero, this is one of his best-known works. From Louis Vierne, perhaps his most impressionistic composition will be performed: Clair de lune. Nadia Boulanger, who became especially renowned as the teacher of many famous composers, wrote three pieces with impressionistic elements for organ in her early twenties.Although Sauget cannot strictly be counted among the impressionists, this musical legacy still resonates faintly in his work, even in the 14-minute Oraisons for organ and saxophone from 1976, performed here by Ties Mellema, winner of the prestigious Dutch Music Prize 2010, on no fewer than four different saxophones. The saxophone also features in Impressions d’automne by André Caplet, another work strongly coloured by impressionism. The saxophone fits this musical language perfectly, since a large part of the classical saxophone repertoire originates from France, particularly from the period of impressionism and the decades that followed.
The music of the impressionist masters is often associated with the piano repertoire. The organ in meantone tuning, however, offers a fascinating new perspective on these subtle and intimate compositions. Meantone tuning emphasises the purity of the thirds and possesses a distinctive tone colour that evokes both nostalgia and renewal – as if an echo of the Renaissance merges with the refined sound world of the ‘fin de siècle’.